Roleplaying

Celeste moved her hand a little farther out, twitching the forefinger upwards two times, beckoning him to hand her the tooth. A cut didn't scare her, and after seeing how effectively it worked she only felt more of a desire to inspect it. It would be like getting her hand on a new toy, something to study and look into. It was valuable in her eyes. She was steady, unbending, and resolved.

“I'm sure.”

Her brows raised, eyes widened, head tilted – she transformed into an innocent puppy waiting expectantly without knowing what she was doing. Her eyes were clear, patient, waiting, and her hand stretched out again in persistence. Small silver scars across her palms shined in the dim lighting, testaments to her dedication to her work and pushing forward despite whatever bodily harm might befall her own self.

It was like a flip had switched- Verit's lips curled back in response to the mutt's expression, looking as if he had smelled something awful. "No," he said coldly. Something in him screeched the word fiercely, and he refused to oblige the other. There was a fierce distrust in Verit's eyes, and whatever strange thing had overtaken him earlier when he offered the tooth was gone.

Popping the white wedge into his mouth, Verit bit down hard. There was a crunch like glass pieces crushed underfoot as the tooth turned into shards in his mouth. Verit swallowed hard. He really should have waited a moment longer before breaking the tooth, but he didn't care as he gave the mutt a steely look before quickly turning and retreated into the depths of his cell, stalking away like a feral animal.

Verit felt the shards slash deep paths in his throat, the cuts burning a blinding hot. He turned away because tears were coming from his eyes in sheer pain, and he braced his elbows on either side of his face as he leaned heavily against the far corner of his cell.

Celeste felt little tears of anger prick at the corners of her eyes. Her throat tightened and ached as she held them back from escaping onto her cheeks. Her hands tightened nearly into fists, and her breathing cut short. A finger itched and jumped at the idea of grabbing the key to the cell and letting herself in, but she wasn't foolish, and she wouldn't let her emotions bring her to do something that would likely end up causing herself and Jett harm.

It was in that moment as she tried to regain her composure that a thought struck her as interesting – an idea – and she amused it until it had unfolded into a small experiment of sorts. The thing led her to quickly wipe away her tears, relax her throat, and say,

“Alright.”

Then she promptly sat on the cold ground before the cell, legs crossed and spine aligned neatly over her hips.

Verit was struggling under a sea of strain. His ears rung impossibly loudly, the volume of silence increasing with each passing moment. He could not hear anything past it. It was like his eyes and ears were defunct- open or closed, silent or deafening, it was impossible to tell.

The feeling of the rough concrete wall, the solid floor beneath him, the wetness on his cheeks, was fading in and out of sensation. Solid, grounding reality slipped out of his grasp. There was nothing but white smell- he couldn't sense the mutt, the human, nothing. It was like his outward senses had all shut off, replaced by one sheer, overwhelming, mind-numbing pain.

Verit's thoughts were completely shut out, taken over, and he fought to somehow stay conscious. He was drowning, inhaling fire, suffocating on air- and completely unresponsive.

His hair went pure white.

The healer spirit in Celeste exploded into action, putting her experiment on pause. She unlocked the barred door and crashed it shut behind her, sealing herself in the cell with her patient and dropping next to him. One hand rested on the base of his neck, fingers gently fanning out across his shoulders. The other snagged his jaw and turned his head.

“Look at me, look – tell me what I can do,” she commanded.

Through her fingers Celeste could feel the disturbance in his throat, knew that something was wrong, and her guess of the problem was nearly exact. She could put two and two together without any trouble; it was one of the requirements to her occupation.

Verit's eyes were open unseeingly, his pupils having dilated so wide the brown of his irises disappeared into a thin halo. He was deaf to the mutt's words, his ears filled with silence. With a mindless, gurgling hiss that could only have been produced from air forcing past liquid, Verit defensively batted the mutt's touch away in a sweep, registering it as a threat. His other hand came up in a blind fist that missed its mark, the momentum sending him to the ground with a skid.

Verit lay still for a full minute, unmoving, and still as death. Then, he took a sharp, ragged intake of breath, his throat's rawness renewing as he did. He inhaled as much liquid as he did air, and he burst into a coughing fit, red sifting from his mouth and staining the concrete beneath him. Verit pressed his hands hard to his forehead with a growl as he folded in on himself.

He was flickering in and out of control, disorientated, trying to focus on staying above the pain before going under again. His breaths came in harsh as he tried to force himself into taking even and regular inhalations instead of quick, shallow breaths. His body was stiff as he fought spasms, his fingers twisting into his off-white hair in stress.

Celeste was hardly fazed at the ghoul's attack. Calmly, she wrapped her arms around him and, using all of her strength, pulled him onto his knees and clutched his side up against her chest, one hand holding his forehead and the other wrapping his arms to his ribs. She kept him bent over, willing him to cough past the blood and breathe.

“Illness, you're too troublesome,” Celeste said to her patient.

She held him firmly, but not tightly, refusing to let him struggle or push her away again. It was an odd sensation. It wasn't irregular for many people in the Collective to shower and spoil her with affections, both verbal and physical, but for the tables to be turned, for her to be the one giving the comforting, to do the holding, was something else entirely. It made her shy and caused her to question whether she was doing the right thing – was it okay? Was she allowed to be so physical?

She was a healer, though, first and foremost. Remembering that chased her hesitancy far to the back of her mind, and she recalled her vow to do anything to save her patients. That trumped any awkward or uncomfortable action she may have had to take.

Verit stiffened as he was lifted but was too exhausted to fight back. Instead, he just allowed himself be subject to the unwanted touch- thought for the most part he couldn't tell if he was really feeling any sensation or not. As the last bits of color drained from the roots of his hair, the worse of the injuries in his throat were patched up, the flow of red stemmed.

With the most life-threatening of wounds out of the way, what Verit had left was a throat that felt as if it had been rubbed raw by sandpaper- far tamer a sensation in comparison to the indescribable initial suffering.

Opening his eyes and swallowing the last of the liquid with a grimace, Verit stared down at the ground in a daze. His fingers loosened their grip on his feathery, newly-white hair and he slumped lightly, thoroughly spent.

Back off, Verit wanted to hiss. His throat was far too sore, however, and his body refused to do much more than breathe. He was going to try and pry the mutt's fingers from him- his first instinct- and detach himself, but his hands only went so far as to slide through his hair, leaving a trail of strands only slightly more mussed-up than usual. His senses were dull, and it was like he was sedated. His body didn't want to do anything other than stay complacent and still, and he couldn't do anything about it.

Celeste wrapped her arms around him from the side and hugged his shoulder to her body, pulling him in as close as she could. She knew she would be pushed away, rejected, as soon as the ghoul was capable of moving again, but silently she cursed off caution, unwilling to give up what she had in that moment. There, on the cold floor in the poor light of a bare light bulb, the healer clung to her patient.

Celeste could flawlessly remember the first hug she'd been given from someone other than her own parents. When her mother died, so did the notion of physicality in her father, and unknowing of the damage that was being done to her mental health, she was starved of personal, bodily attention. Months as a member of the Collective went by, and months worth of friendships were formed. Jett had been the first person to break the barrier around her that kept others from touching her – he had pulled her into the first hug she'd had in years, and with that hug came years worth of tears and desperation for any sort of physical contact from a caring being.

That was what she felt, what she remembered, what she hoped for the ghoul as she held him. It was why she rarely denied anyone the touch they seemed to need from her, why she allowed others to hold and pet her so freely. She knew how releasing it was, even if it felt unnatural and uncomfortable in the beginning.

Three, two, one...

Verit braced his hands on the ground and attempted to push himself up, hoping to shrug off the mutt's clinging as quickly as he could. He'd ticked off the seconds until he deemed his body ready enough to do something, and he spared not a moment once the time was up to get it into action.

Get... Off... Verit thought harshly as he struggled to get onto his feet from his all-fours position, as if somehow the message would get across telepathically. He didn't want to be touched and his skin crawled where he was. Finding that the mutt was acting like an anchor around his sides, Verit finally deigned to scoop it up best he could and, with a heave, quickly shuffle towards the bars of the cell with the mutt in his arms.

Reaching somewhat near the entry just as his strength ran out, Verit came down to his knees a few steps away from the bars, setting the mutt down onto the floor rather unceremoniously. With a glare, he pointedly pushed the mutt towards the door. There was no way he was going to get too far even if he did escape at this point, and the human outside would surely overpower him if they went head-on. What Verit did want was the mutt to get on the other side, a good distance away from him where he wouldn't be touched quite against his will.

Up Celeste went into the ghoul's arms, and down her stomach went to the floor. She was stunned, terrified, surprised, and found herself unable to scramble from his arms. Even upon being nearly dumped on hard concrete her frozen demeanor wasn't broken. Unlike Jett, she had a much harder time hiding her thoughts and feelings – everything she felt was evident on her face in that moment, from her widened eyes and parted lips to her rapidly rising-falling chest and stiffened muscles.

Slowly, her mind slipped back into her possession, and the healer remembered her experiment, her idea, and nodded to the patient, using the bars to assist her to standing. She pulled the key from her top and unlocked the cell to let herself out. Her actions were nearly silent, including the shutting of the door, hanging of the key, and climbing back onto the cot where she sat in the unshaken cobwebs of surprise and disbelief.

Satisfied that the mutt was sufficiently on the other side of the bars and not intending on returning anytime soon, Verit gave it one last narrow look before pushing off of the floor and making his way to the cell's cot, slowly and deliberately.

Settling down in front of the cot with his back once again facing his company, Verit lifted his fingers to his face and studied the cuts on them. Most of the red from earlier had been blotted and smeared, turning his hands into a patchwork of red blotches and streaks on white. It was strange because Verit didn't recall his fingers ever feeling so cold- they'd always been warm in the past. At least, he thought he remembered them as so. He never really paid attention.

Straightening out his fingers turned to be a mistake, however, as a cut on his index started a fresh, slightly stronger stream of red. It went down the palm of his hand, and gone on to trickle down his wrist. Verit caught the flow before it got to his forearm, and idly decided to screw it and drew a happy face on the inside of his wrist, using his other hand's second finger as a paintbrush.

Odd electricity ran its way through Celeste's body, and she began shivering. Knees were pulled to chest, and arms were wrapped 'round legs as she tried to hug the surprise away, hoping to hold herself together in the process. Discomfort was seeping its way from her brain into her chest like a cold snow melt.

Hugs, pets, massages – those were things she was used to, but being fully held and, at that, picked up so carelessly, was far from something she felt she was prepared for. It had knocked her off of her feet (literally) and put her in an odd state of mental war over how she felt about being touched so casually in a manner she felt should have been much more personal and should have held much more meaning to anyone carrying out such an action. It bothered her, but her mind was still too surprised to properly assess things in her usual manner.

So she questioned: What really was personal, in touch? Was it okay that the others gave her as much physical attention as they did, or was it too much? What kind of line was she supposed to draw? Was it actually natural for them to treat her the way they did? Why didn't she see them giving others just as much physical love as they seemed to give her? Did she simply miss it, or did they treat her differently, and if they did, then why?

Too many variables of race and relationship began to crowd her mind, and she closed her eyes, putting her head on her knees to try and shut them all in, to put them into order. Things were a mess.

'My Illness... causing so many symptoms...' she thought.

Suddenly annoyed by the fact that none of his cuts would stop dripping, Verit balled his hands into fists and stuffed them into his pockets. The happy face he had drawn earlier smeared into a streak on his arm, leaving a stain. While he couldn't see his cuts, he could still feel droplets escaping their confines and welling to the surface.

Letting his forehead fall onto the side of the cot, Verit glared at nothing in particular. He hated how he would just keep bleeding and bleeding until his body came around to patching a cut up- which was becoming especially scarce now that most of its resources, he reckoned, had already been spent dealing with the numerous nosebleeds, knockouts, and inedible crap he'd been subject to for the duration of the day.

Verit's nose easily picked up the mutt's scent of confusion, but he didn't bother trying to figure anything out. He was occupied by feeling weak and frustrated, cursing everything and anything he could think of.

Celeste pushed her thoughts away violently and straightened herself up, swinging her legs off of the cot and meeting the floor with her calloused feet. Without explanation or word of excuse she left the room, cracked the door behind her, and floated down the hall until she emerged in the front office.

Eol was leaning against the front door, watching out its window while listening to the desk keeper's aimless words. He had his arms and all four legs crossed, and his tail held a cup of steaming tea. He was the first of the two to notice Celeste.

A moment slower was Greg the Mutt. His lips were poised as words spilled from his mouth and began to die away at the sight of their pleasant intruder, and, instinctively, he reached up to tuck his deep purple hair behind a double pointed ear. His skin was patched with blended grey and black, a telling sign of his alien-ghoul mixed blood if that was truly what ran through his veins.

“Celeste! I didn't know if you were coming to visit, sweetheart,” he said, dropping his feet from the desk top to the floor.

Might I have a favor? she signed slowly.

“I caught 'might I have', that's it,” Greg answered, squinting at her hands. “I don't know the other word.”

Eol stepped forward, a wall of peaceful intimidation. “Favor. Celeste wants a favor.”

The healer gave him a tiny smile that sparkled her eyes and caught him off guard. He turned his head slightly but wouldn't divert his eyes – he wouldn't back down in the face of shyness, especially where she was concerned.

“Oh, favor, of course, baby! What can I do?” Greg asked, completely unaware of his Agoarn friend's moment of struggle.

I need items from the fridge, she signed.

He grinned and jumped from his seat, grabbing a set of keys off the table and heading towards a small, unlit hallway. Celeste trailed after him, eyes, blinking and adjusting to the darkness that he could see straight through. The keys flashed, and a door opened to let them into a small room full shelves and odd boxes stacked precariously high. Greg shuffled to the farthest corner and twisted at another lock, this time opening the fridge door that let out a frosty stream of light.

“Which one, sweetheart?” he asked, turning to look over his shoulder.

She pointed and signed the colors for red and blue, and he grabbed a tin box and thermos before shutting and relocking both fridge and closet doors. They wandered back to the lobby, though before they stepped into the light of the two bulbs that cast an odd whiteness around the room, he tousled her hair lightly. It was a familiar gesture, but after it was over and the sensation had gone she found herself questioning its purpose, his reason for touching her.

“You got everything you need?” Eol asked, bringing her out of her thoughts.

She nodded before signing a thanks and jogging down the hallway leaving only the echoes of her bare feet and the light smell of a spring rain behind her.

Little knuckles knocked on steel, and under a section of hinged bars she slid the lunchbox and thermos towards the new ager. The tin scraped, and the cylinder rolled, crunching dirt in its path, but neither noise was capable of waking Jett, only causing him to roll to a side.

“It's human, in the tin, and water.”

Earth is a dangerous place, whether in the hybrid-infested countryside or crumbling, dark cities, but no place is more dangerous or rough than New Chicago. Whether out on the streets or high in the penthouses, no one's truly safe.

The world has become a new place. Some people call it impossible, but others just call it apocalyptic. There's barely a government, and what's left of it is corrupt and dangerous - the people live in factions, gangs, or try to survive on their own, and the only peace between them are through the pacts that have been made. The rich thrive and keep themselves safe, but anyone unfortunate enough to be less than that spends every day hoping to stay alive.

Species:
Ghouls - they're intelligent beings, humanoid in appearance. Their skin rots, and their lifespan is determined by how long their meat stays on their bones.

Zombies - they're dumb and benign unless angered or bothered. They're brainless, so essentially they don't do anything except wander around, bump into things, and (on the occasion) turn into a terrifying killing and flesh-eating monster. These aren't characters, but they can be used by any writer as a tool, the way one would write about a pet or object a character interacts with. If you plan on using a zombie, PM me to clarify what you want to use one for.

Humans - just like us, but now they share their planet with many other species. Many feel cheated out of their home, and most scramble to keep their kind from dying out.

Aliens - there are many, many kinds, and over the years they've adapted to the newness of the world. From tall to small, these creatures come in all shapes, sizes, and origins. (PM me to clarify what kind of alien you would like to be - it has to be your own creation or one that someone else in the roleplay has made up).

Mutts - an alien-human, alien-alien, ghoul-alien offspring.

Hybrids - always different, always weird, hybrids are animal-human-zombie creatures. Whether four legs or two, each species of hybrids are as oddly animal as they are humanoid. Some can talk, most can't, but all have a highly feral nature and are willing to 'defend' themselves quickly through force.

Additional - any species you think should be on this list that isn't. PM me if you have any ideas.

None yet.

THE ROLEPLAY SLOGAN: Falcon hug that piece of beef jerkwad

No godmoding, guys - be cool

Come up with your own, unique charater, but make their personality realistic. No one likes a Mary Sue or an impossible character.

You only get to kill another character, or injure, if you have the writer's permission.

Don't let things that happen in character affect or influence how you treat someone out of character, and please don't use your character as a way to get at another roleplayer. Don't be cheap.

If you want to write a huge post, go for it! Write a huge one! But, before you do so, write up a message in the OOC chat to let everyone else know it might be a bit and to wait to post until you finish.

If you need to write a post that connects directly to a previous post, but you're worried that someone else might post before you can finish writing, say something in the OOC chat and everyone will wait to post until your done, but you only have a 4 hour window to finish up and post.

Always check the OOC before you post, just so you know what's up.

Breaking the rules can end up in being expelled (kicked out, or whatever you want to call it) from the roleplay depending on the offence.

Lastly, if you have any questions, hit me up. If you choose to be an alien, mutt, or hybrid, send me a message giving me more information on your character as well as an example of what your roleplay post might be like so I can get a sense of what kind of writer you are. If I like your moxie, you're in.