#edit: read the description. gun range. that's kind of what I figured.

[noiivvern]

looking at zillow listings of stupid expensive houses what the FUCK is this room for

[loremonster]

Slush Pile : Nightmares

While not plot-important, this little scene is something I feel like would go between the current story and the next as Kenny and Dee start breaking more rules to spend time together. I’m still considering it for inclusion in the story, but I don’t know if it fits in just yet or would play any important role to the plot... more likely than not, it won’t make it over to fanfiction, so enjoy this bonus content! Feels, somewhat unsettling descriptions, and cursing ahead! Enjoy!

It’s the right thing. 

She’d told herself the moment she began to feel her insides squirming, the way they churned, as if some living creature within her guts were eager to burst forth. It was not unlike the feeling of being entirely too full, the contents of the stomach threatening to burst up through the mouth when the midsection was so much as bent... but it wasn’t an excess of food she was gritting her teeth against, trying desperately to ignore as more and more coppery-tasting black bile was swallowed back, welling up from places unknown. No, no, there was something unthinking and vicious, gluttonous and oh so hungry. 

It was going to escape if this didn’t happen. She knew it would. It would emerge from the chrysalis of her flesh, and wreak the very havoc she’d come to avoid. 

It’s the right thing. 

She looked up, up to the good doctor Kartwright and her silenced pistol where it hovered a mere inch from her brow. This had been the plan since she began throwing up at home, since she arrived in this un-disastered timeline and became aware that she was the disaster, walking about with both the key to salvation and the disease that would consume everything in its wake if not stopped. 

She’d expected to cry, or be afraid.

Get it over with. 

Gunshots in movies were bullshit-- there was no flash. All of that was edited in post-- and they rarely reflected just how loud a gun was. How the shot could be felt in the flesh and rang in unprotected ears. Even with a silencer, there was a punctuation to a gunshot that was immistakable, a reverberation in the ribs as shocked air rushed away from a point of ignition. 

Somehow, she found herself aware of it. Aware of this moment, and perchance that was fitting, as it would be her very last; her last breath, gasped in at the exact second of the shot. Her last impulse, to twitch upwards into a tense posture.

Her last thought, wondering if she really would continue on as the self that was still alive, or if that girl was an entirely separate existence that she’d never get to know. 

At least she’ll get to live.

-PAGEBREAK-

She awoke in the dark of her room, not in her bed but on the floor. It wasn’t like she’d fallen out of bed-- no, she was upright, sitting upon her knees. Kneeling. 

Her hand flew to her forehead, where she could almost still feel where the bullet had ripped through her. Feel the sensation of skin and skull giving way before her brain had been sundered and her awareness ended in a terrible lack of all. No dark, no light, no sound, nothing.

Terrible, terrible nothing. 

But that wasn’t what was here. No, she inhaled deeply and could smell the familiar scent of home. Her room, her blankets, the wood of the house-- even faint traces of the casserole her father had baked that night, probably not more than three or four hours ago. 

She was the girl. The girl that other version of her had been so worried about-- the one who didn’t get shot in the head, but had instead safely slept through the whole ordeal, believed sick by her parents and left alone. 

Her posture bent, her other hand feeding up into tangled curls of red hair, nails digging into her skull. 

She could still feel the track of the bullet, burning, searing, torn through-- the shock-wave that had gone through her brain and turned her gray matter into jelly.

She could still feel herself dying.

She wanted to claw it out. Rip her own head open just to make it stop, as if she could dig in and scratch away the offending sensation like one did an itch. Great balls of hair were gathered into fists, and she pulled, pulled until it hurt, pulled until she doubled over and cried into her knees. 

Somewhere behind her, she heard her phone buzz. The sound was distinct; vibration against a hard surface-- her end table? That was where she usually left it, but incidents of sleepwalking had left her phone in odd places before. 

Who cares? It’s crazy late. No one is gonna give a fuck whether I respond now or later. 

An excuse, an excuse to remain down with her eyes pressed into the tops of her knees, nose fitted into the crease between her legs and her merciless knuckles refusing to loosen their grip.

It buzzed again. And again. And again. And again. 

Serial murders snorting jizz, who the fuck needs me this badly at-- at-- at whatever fucking time this is?? 

Damnit, she had to let go of herself just to check the clock-- 1:00 AM. Oh. That time. 

Even as she confirmed it, the sudden barrage of what sounded like texts made even less sense. Who the fuck was blowing up her phone past midnight? Sniveling, wiping her eyes with the back of one hand, she toddled back to her bed and flopped over onto the soft surface of her mattress, reaching across for her phone to unlock it and see which name was taking over her notifications box.

Kenny. 

Suddenly, her little episode was near forgotten. She opened her messenger quickly, scared that something had happened, that Kenny needed her and she was just sitting in a heap in the middle of the floor, freaking out about a phantom bullet in her skull. 

[Received, 1:00] Hey [Received, 1:00] i no its rlly late but... [Received, 1:00] idk i just had this fucked up dream and it made me worry about u [Received, 1:00] just making sure ur ok [Received, 1:01] srry if i woke u

She blinked at the small wall of texts, having to scroll a little to see all of it. What was he talking about? What kind of dream? 

Was he suffering from a memory echo as well? Something from that aborted timeline, or one of the dozens of others she’d undone in the past in which he’d taken mortal damage? 

[Sent, 1:01] I’m awake... I actually just had a bad dream, too [Sent, 1:01] Well, not a dream. Memories. Y’know. I’ve told you about it before. [Sent, 1:01] You?

There was a pause, and she worried he may have fallen back asleep, having only been awake enough to send a bunch of texts before passing the fuck out again... but that theory was proved wrong a moment later. 

[Received, 1:03] same [Received , 1:03] its weird, i dont remember anything from it when im awake, but the dreams happen and its like remembering, like its real [Received, 1:04] then it fades away again. its almost gone right now [Received, 1:04] cartman was a zombie? he bit me, u pulled him off me, i ran away [Received, 1:04] i was scared for karen

That was something she hadn’t heard before-- then again, she could barely remember what happened half of the time. Certain things stuck in her mind, came and went, but it was so hard to hold two separate realities in the mind at the same time... and other timelines intruded upon her at seemingly random intervals as well. Things got intermixed all the time-- the only one that made the zombie time-line special was the fact that she died at the end of it, and that she’d been speaking to Kenny for a great deal of it... a first, in all of her mishaps through time. 

She read over his description, over and over, trying to make herself recall. She thought she did-- mostly she remembered Cartman’s bloated body falling down a set of stairs before she went after him to stomp on his fucking skull. The rest refused to remain solvent.

[Sent, 1:06] i remember him falling down the elementary school stairs.

[Received, 1:06] me too. u jumped on him. i watched long enough to make sure you were okay, but something was wrong with me. i had to run. [Received, 1:07] ... i think i went up to the roof? [Received, 1:07] ... i think i jumped. 

That’s one way to make sure you don’t hurt your sister. She couldn’t speak to any of that. She couldn’t remember leaving the elementary school, but she knew some short time after dealing with Cartman, she’d run into Dr. Kartwright, who had given her a cellphone with a message to convince her past self to take action. 

She didn’t know what to say to him, what might help. Did she tell him about her own nightmare? How the sensation of being shot haunted her? It felt like she didn’t have room to talk; he’d been through thousands of deaths, spoken about how each and every one of them was still vivid in his memory. That he knew what it was like to be impaled, burned, electrocuted, shot, stabbed, and many others... what was her single moment of suffering in the face of his much more tortuous state? 

Her screen blurred. She was tearing up again, swallowing over a lump in her throat while her cheeks burned in a mixture of shame and... and... she didn’t know what-- terror? The danger was past, she was alive, and still the horror of it robbed her of her sleep and left her in this empty and broken state, traumatized by an event that no longer existed. 

Sniffing, she typed.

[Sent, 1:09] Are you alright?  [Sent, 1:10] I think I’m going to be awake for a while if you need someone to talk to.

She rolled her head into her pillow, stifling a sob. 

[Received, 1:10] im good [Received, 1:11] i texted to see if u were ok [Received, 1:11] u said you had a dream too, what happened?

It took her several minutes of shoving her head into her pillow before she even lifted her head and peered at the new set of messages upon her softly glowing screen. She rolled onto her belly, sniffing hard and crumpling her pillow beneath her chest and staring down at her messenger, trying to figure out what to say while the tears once again came to a stop, although breathing was still harder than it should have been. 

He asked. She told herself. That makes it worth telling, right? 

She typed for longer than she meant to, going into details she’d half-forgotten by this point, but apparently her thumbs were able to uncover those little things-- the sound of the birds out in the woods, the way the leaf litter had felt under her knees, the smell of the oil Dr. Kartwright used to keep her gun clean.

She painted a terribly vivid picture, even to herself. She wrote of the moment, so much so that her phone had to pause a second and convert into a multimedia message because she’d typed too much for SMS. She’d gotten to waking up, the sensation that still itched inside her brain case.

She stared at it. Paragraphs of description, of the horror that had been replaying the most often for her these days. Why? Why this? Did her subconscious choose which moments to fixate upon? Why did this one have to keep coming back to her? 

She frowned faintly. Was she being over-dramatic? Maybe this was too much... 

[Received, 1:19] pls dont delete anything [Received, 1:19] i want to hear it

HOW THE FUCK DOES HE DO THAT??? Glaring at her phone-- no, no, she was pouting, pouting at her phone, she pressed and held on her great big text-block and hit the ‘select all’ button to copy it, delete it, and type a shorter message in its place.

[Sent, 1:20] WOULD YOU KINDLY EXPLAIN HOW YOU READ MY GODDAMN MIND?!

[Received, 1:20] i know u. u dont think your shit is worth talking about, worth listening to [Received, 1:21] it is. pls tell me?

Knows me too damn fucking well. If this were a spy movie, I’d have to kill him.

With a sigh, the text block was pasted back into the messenger, and she sent it-- her whole episode in grueling detail. 

Reading over it, seeing it confirmed as sent made her bury damp eyes into the fabric of her pillow once more. Something in her was so goddamn afraid, but she didn’t understand why. 

She remained there until her phone buzzed in her hands. Eyes were bleary and wet when she rose up, blinking a few times. 

Then she blinked a few more. 

[Received, 1:24] do u want me to come over? [Received, 1:24] i noticed ur basement has one of those little storm windows, i could slip in thru there and we could hang out

[Sent, 1:25] It’s past midnight on a school night, and you wanna hold my punching bag for me? 

[Received, 1:25] if itll make u feel better, yeah

... well, if he’s offering... 

[Sent, 1:26] I think it would. [Sent, 1:26] Thanks. 

[jjnonken]

Generally, when I show off pictures of my base, I do mostly exterior shots and neglect the interior. Part of that is that the interior is pretty boring; just a bunch of workstations and boxes with labels on them. Also, it’s difficult to get shots that really give a sense of the space and show the layout. But aside from the Killing Corridor, most of the work on a prefab is re-organizing the interior. (Except the A-frame conversion, where the Killing Corridor is the interior... :)

Usually I start by removing non-working cabinets and the like; either replacing windows with intact panes or sealing them off and painting them to match. I sealed off the kitchen windows but repaired the living room windows; most of the upper floor windows got sealed off, but I repaired the one next to the bed. Some of the cabins (like this one, and the A-frame cabin I’ve converted twice before) have a second-floor loft; in that case I replace the stairs with a ladder and extend the floor to fill the space.

I replaced the bed with an identical, working bed. I did the same to the spare bedroom next to the living room, which I don’t show here; I figure if anybody moves in there, they can redecorate how they please, but I left them a working (twin) bed. By “working” I mean that it serves as a bedroll, of course.

Most of the conversion is unremarkable: plenty of storage; room for expansion in the workroom; clothes, weapons, armor, vehicles and trader boxes are all in the living room where they’ll be handy when you’re leaving. Food and refreshments in the kitchen. I bought a bathroom drug cabinet to replace the broken one in the bathroom and stocked it with drugs; I bought the other style of medicine cabinet and placed it in the kitchen just outside the bathroom like a first aid cabinet, and stocked it with first aid stuff. One range and the wall oven are functional (thank you, Home Depot modlet!) and the other range is lootable.

I cheated a little by having Katana (who has admin privs) Creative Mode me some working bookcases -- and by “working” I mean “for storage” -- which I placed adjacent to the two lootable bookcases. (I only cheated because they’re not craftable and AFAICT not purchasable from the trader, and I wanted to more-or-less match the existing decor. Otherwise I’d have placed storage boxes or cabinets; it’s not like having these gives me any kind of real gaming advantage. It’s just for pretty. I suppose if I feel enough remorse, I can craft a set of cupboards and throw them away so that I’ve at least expended the resources. You can craft empty shelves, but they have no storage; they’re just, well, empty shelves.) Both of the campfires in the fireplace are functional.

The exterior shots are of the roof with the access hatch and solar panel and of one of the four corner turrets. Those are awesome; it’s annoying as fuck to be trying to work inside and have to drop everything every two minutes to deal with wandering zombies. Especially when you’re running the forges and getting screamers. With the turrets in place, all you have to do is pause every two minutes to laugh maniacally. ... Well, that’s what I do, anyway. YMMV.

Wiring is partly courtesy of the aforementioned Home Depot modlet, which adds some wireless wiring that keeps things looking neater and at the same time adds functional breaker boxes.

...Now that I read over the Home Depot modlet description again, I see that they may have added a “bookcase” texture which presumably would allow me to create a cupboard and repaint it to look like a bookcase. I’ll have to give that a try, and perhaps un-cheat the bookshelves. I don’t remember seeing that texture, so I’m not positive it’s there, but there are a lot of things I don’t remember. I’ll check it out.

[edit] Son of a gun, I think I forgot to paint the top pyramid on that turret. Bah.