Post by Ethel on Feb 16, 2014 3:51:37 GMT
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Ethel cried. Like a bitch. A were-bitch.
But in all honesty, the poor girl sobbed into her hands for a good hour. Who wouldn’t after waking up on a subway car all alone. She couldn’t read any of the maps, PSAs, or even the advertisements inside the subway. There wasn’t a single word in English. Nothing was written in the Latin alphabet, or Cyrillic. They weren’t even zhuyin fuhao or Devanagari anything she could even recognize. Everything was completely alien to her. Even if she couldn’t read anything but English (and few others, but shh; let no one know she is more intelligent than she let’s on), it would have been a comfort to see something she could at least recognize as being ‘Earthly’. At least then she would have an idea where she was at.
She paced back and forth in the subway, waiting for it to stop. For rapid transit, it seemed like it dragged on forever. She felt trapped. She rested her head towards an interior wall of the car. Not against it, of course, why that was just asking for the flu or syphilis or the Black Plague. She knew better than that, even if she was immensely stressed and tired. She fell asleep in her clothes last night, she was that tired. When she lifted her head, she did notice that some of the text imprinting on the header was in what appeared to be some sort of Mesoamerican glyphs. She wasn’t sure which one precisely, but they did look something like the Mayan symbols she remember from all the books she read about ancient civilizations and their temples. She never thought that random bit of knowledge would do her any good, but there was that.
When the subway stopped, she was quick to exit, but she was confronted with a new fear. Now she was all alone in a subway station. Or was she? She didn’t know which thought was scarier. She quickly paced through the underground, her heels clacking against the concrete, allegretto. Though the metro was well-lit, she could have sworn she seen something out of the corner of her eye. The moaning of the railcars sounded like a monster chasing after her. Her tempo soon increased from a simple 99 BPM to a 150 BPM accelerando. As soon as she found an entrance above ground she made a mad dash for the steps. It was a simple thing, but natural light was soothing in comparison to all the glaring artificiality of the lighting inside the metro. She wasn’t sure why. Perhaps it was that it reminded her of those claims people have made about abduction by humanoid creatures and their extra-mundane airships.
She was wondering if that’s what happened to.
She wondered why she was in a subway car instead of some sort of plane or flying machine. However, that doubt faded under the rays the violet skies. She couldn’t detect a singular light source in the sky, but there certainly was a lot of light. She couldn’t think of a reason the skies were so… purple instead of blue. Nothing made any sense.
That’s when she began to cry. She plopped her plump bottom firmly on a bench and cried her little bird heart out for more then even she was comfortable with. But she didn’t know what else to do. She had no idea where she was, how she got there, or how she was even going to get back. Her mind been cycling through the possibilities of her situation. Her initial thought was extra-terrestrials. Everything seemed so alien so it made sense that they would be aliens. Her secondary thought was government brainwashing. After being apprehended for her crimes, instead of setting up a trial and sentencing her with several accounts of first-degree murder, aggravated assault, smuggling, extortion, racketeering, tax evasion, and jaywalking. Only Satan knows what else! The state had her in custody and now some shadow agency was using her as a guinea pig for their experimental drugs*.
Her third thought was that she was stolen from her world by a vaguely Azteco-Mayan god with a chip on his shoulder. Only Ethel was crazy enough to guess right.
Still, it wasn’t her main theory. It was just the Mayan glyphs that planted the seed in her head. Her mind just nurtured that seed with semi-delusional paranoia into an epileptic tree.
She wanted so badly just to sleep, but she had no place to do so. She wasn’t a bum, and further more, she didn’t trust this city or any of its potential denizens (which she was pretty certain were a combination of reptilian humanoids, Lovecraftian cephalophoid fishmen, and pants-shitting fear) enough to even blink. She still hadn’t seen anyone, but she safely assumed everyone was dangerous and out to kill her and uproot her potted plants.
Ethel knew she had to create a ‘home base’ somewhere here. Instead of seeking someone out, she figured more than two hours was well beyond a reasonable amount of time for her to see another human being in a subway located in a huge city of all places. No, this wasn’t a normal situation. This was paranormal, supernatural, extra-terrestrial, what-have-you. She had to think beyond the simplicities of the mundane.
She fast-walked through the City, staking out the perfect place to set up. Many buildings had too many windows for her to feel safe. Some, too few. She didn’t like the material some were constructed of, often feeling the exterior walls for confirmation. Nothing seemed fit for inhabitation.
Except for one. It was a small building. She couldn’t distinguish what it might have been before. The windows seemed to small for a shop. Usually they were large to display goods. Maybe it was an office? A very bleak office. Either way, she approved. It was located some distance away from a much larger building, which worried her, but it wasn’t so tall as to cause harm to the one she picked if it came toppling down. The building was two stories: small enough to maintain effectively while the second story provided more space and high enough ground for look out. The door was made of reinforced steel. The walls were made of 10” CMU, and the masonry was impeccable. There was a single backdoor, this time made of fiberglass, which was of no concern to her as long as the windows would suffice as alternative entry. She actually hadn’t planned on using the front door anyways. She was going to booby trap it later once she had the tools to do so.
Once she cautiously scouted out the interior of the building and officially deemed it acceptable, she jammed the front door with a desk and exited from the back.
She headed off towards to investigate the other buildings in the area, hoping to scavenge things of use.
*Keep in mind this is at least 20 years before MKUltra. Ethel is this paranoid. She is so paranoid she accurately predicts government conspiracies.
