There is nothing wrong with Richard Roe. That is, as several old and patient things are beginning to notice, the trouble with him.
Your alarm doesn't go off. You never set one — the job doesn't start until eleven tonight, and two years of nights have taught you there's no reason to be awake before you're needed. You wake up anyway, 9:14 by the microwave clock. Call it a birthday present from your circadian rhythm.The apartment doesn't have much to say for itself, and neither do you, most days. One bedroom, one chair, a mattress on a frame. A card table that has never once seen a card. The calendar on the wall stays turned to September, uncircled except for one Christmas three years back, from when you used to mark things down.Twenty years old, as of three hours and forty-six minutes ago. You're aware of this the way you're aware of most facts about yourself — correctly, and not much else.No notifications on your phone. No missed calls, no spam texts, not even the extended warranty people, who by now you'd almost consider regulars. You check it again anyway, out of habit more than hope, then make coffee the same way you make it every other morning. Twenty, it turns out, changes nothing about the ratio of grounds to water.The building is quiet in a way you've never really clocked before today. No TV through the wall. No footsteps upstairs. No radiator ticking, no pipes groaning. Two years here and you couldn't describe a single neighbor's sound if asked. You're not dwelling on it — it's just there, like a picture hung crooked that isn't your problem to fix.The fridge has the basics — milk, eggs, a takeout container old enough to qualify as decor. In the freezer, something else: half a sheet cake, your name spelled "RICHRD" in blue icing, bought two birthdays ago on the logic that a cake purchased alone at ten p.m. still counts as celebrating. You've never eaten a slice. You've never thrown it out, either. It's still in there, waiting on a decision you've put off for two years now — one you could, if you wanted, finally make today.Your reflection is exactly what it always is: a face so average people forget it almost as soon as they see it. You stopped minding this a while ago. Mostly.Your gear sits by the door in its usual spot — boots, jacket, and the flashlight. It's a long aluminum thing, heavy enough that a few police departments have specifically banned carrying one as a makeshift club.It's 9:14 now. Work is at eleven. That leaves most of a day ahead of you, blank as the calendar — no plans, no one to call, nothing saying you couldn't spend it exactly like every other day this year.You haven't celebrated a birthday since you moved out. Nothing's argued with you about it yet.What do you do?
Is this AI generated?
You sit at the table and consider that eating a two year old cake is probably not the best idea. Especially right before a job. But today is a milestone; or, at least that's what every person has told you for the last few years. It's what every birthday episode on every sitcom seems to convey. It's even what your little sister told you a few years ago - but you're not going to think about her right now.
>>6464639start the day by eating freezerburnt cake
>>6464645You decide to eat the cake anyway. You bought it. You saved it. And for what? If not today, will it ever be eaten?You stand up and go to the freezer, opening the door, expecting to see the familiar sad sight of a bag of peas and the blue relic from a life you feel you haven't lived for years now. But the cake is gone. The Jolly Green Giant stares back at you, standing above his long-forgotten sea of little green pod-dwellers. His smile feels like he's mocking you for thinking there was even a cake here. ....was it ever there?You slowly close the freezer before you begin to go entirely insane and start picking at the ice, certain it's somewhere in there. As you turn around, defeatedly returning to your seat at the empty card table fully questioning your sanity, you freeze. Sitting in the chair across from yours is your sister. This is not possible... she's.. she has been.. you suddenly realize that the *real* problem here is the fact that chair has been broken for months now ever since you sat that large stolen Monsterra plant on it.You sister is calmly sitting with her hands crossed in front of her. The cake is on the table next to her, still proudly displaying "RICHRD" as if it was a glowing award for its greatest achievment. She looks right through you, her gaze as icy as the cake must be, and she smiles.
>>6464642You mull over the meaning of the day as pop culture has made a point of ingraining into your expectation. Given your track-record it would be equally as weird to do nothing today as it would be to figure out something to do at all — in that regard, there's just no winning . . .>>6464645In an uncharacteristic fit of taking initiative, you gun for glacier in your top-freezer.The cake, once liberated from the freezer, turns out to require some effort. Two years of cold have not been kind to it. You work a butter-knife around the edges like you're excavating something, and the slice that finally comes free is more ice than anything and is definitely the wrong shape for cake.Verdict: mostly freezer-burned, vaguely sweet. Somewhere under all that is, ostensibly, cake. You eat the whole piece anyway. Momma didn't raise no quitters and, in fact, didn't really raise you at all.Around the third bite, the refrigerator's hum cuts out. It's not off — just gone, like it stopped mid-sentence. And then it's back just as suddenly. The building stays exactly as quiet as it was an hour ago. Some things, apparently, don't take a day off either.You finish the wedge before you get around to wondering how you ended up working nights at a property nobody's ever bothered explaining to you — more or less the same way you ended up with the perma-cake. You called a phone number on a flyer missing an area code and without much ado got the job. The paycheck shows up regardless, every two weeks. The number itself is still saved in your phone. You've never called it back as there's never been a reason to.The plate goes in the sink with everything else that's been sitting there a while.What do you do?>>6464641I used it to punch it up a little and fix some flow issues.
>>6464656There are thirteen hours until my shift starts. The smart thing to do would be to take a nap, but I've become invigorated by all the sugar I just consumed.I think it might be time to go out. To the grocery store. To get the same thing I get almost every day of my life.
>>6464669Thirteen hours is a lot of nothing to have ahead of you, and napping just puts that same empty on the other side of sleep.The sugar's still arguing with you regardless, buzzing behind your sternum in a way two-year-old freezer cake has no business doing. You lace up. The flashlight stays by the door; it's not that kind of errand.The block outside does what it always does, which is nothing, and the walk's close enough to autopilot that you could probably narrate someone else's morning without missing a step of your own. Twenty doesn't change that either, it turns out.The doors stick a half-second longer than they should, and right as you clear them the fluorescence over the registers flickers. Nobody else seems to notice.The candy aisle's got a new display since you last looked — powder-and-stick candy, gaudy enough to read from across the store. You leave it where it is.Around the frozen aisle you get the impression of someone at the far end, cardigan on despite the AC making short sleeves optional, watching the freezer doors instead of watching you. You look again on reflex. Nobody's there. Possibly nobody ever was.At the counter now — same two-dollar scratcher, same game, every day. Gary rings you up. Gary, per the badge — you've never had cause to confirm it out loud. Something like six hundred days of this, maybe forty words total between you, and it's still the most consistent relationship of your adult life.You scratch it there at the counter, same as always. The latex comes up a run of nines this time — three in a row, where the numbers are supposed to be random and mean nothing regardless. Coincidence has apparently decided to phone this one in.The corkboard by the exit has its usual rotation, plus something new: a county flyer about copper thefts hitting vacant commercial buildings nearby — the kind of thing you'd only read twice if you had a personal stake in old copper, which, so far as you know, you don't.The payphone out front — dead since before you moved to this neighborhood, four hundred passes without a sound out of it — rings. Once. You stop walking. It rings again, and then, before you settle on an opinion about it, it doesn't ring a third time.You've got a little under thirteen hours left before your shift, no plans for any of them, and a losing scratcher to show for the morning.What do you do?
Well, need another scratchie and some caffeine, off to 7/11
>>6464691Home can wait. Caffeine can't, not with a graveyard shift on the other side of thirteen hours and a nap you've already talked yourself out of twice. You reroute.7-Eleven's ten minutes past the store, past gas pumps nobody's using and a payphone that isn't the one that rang. You check anyway, annoyed at the reflex.Inside, the fluorescence behaves for once. Small mercies.You grab two of the biggest energy drinks in the reach-in cooler and ignore the warning labels as god intended.The scratcher's a formality by now, same as breathing. Different clerk this time — kid, headphones, doesn't look up long enough to actually see you, which suits you fine. This ticket comes up dead. Not eerie-dead, not three-nines dead — just blank, every number a miss.On your way out, two guys by the coffee station are going back and forth about the old phone company building off the highway — fence around it, supposedly still got live wires in it somewhere. You don't say anything. You know exactly which building they mean because you're due there at eleven.Outside, somebody's hood is up at pump three — older guy, hazards on, staring at a dead battery. You've got nowhere else to be and no good reason to keep walking, so you don't.It turns into more of an afternoon than you meant it to. No jumper cables between the two of you, the kid at the register doesn't have any either, and the tow he calls quotes an hour that turns into two and a half. You end up holding his phone's flashlight under the hood for most of it, saying maybe a dozen words the whole time, which is about your speed. By the time the truck finally hooks up and hauls the car off, you can't call it morning anymore.He tries to hand you thirty bucks on his way into the cab and you take it before you even realize what it is.You've got about eight hours left before your shift, thirty dollars you didn't have this morning, and daylight that isn't going to last much longer.A) Head home. Actually try to sleep this time, sugar be damned.B) Spend the thirty on something for yourself. Nobody else remembered the day.C) Kill the rest of the light somewhere quiet — the library, maybe. Away from people.D) Swing past the building off the highway for a look at it in daylight, since you'll be standing in it come dark anyway.
>>6464726Might as well go to the store and spend the thirty bucks on myself. It's not a windfall that can change my life, so I might as well enjoy having it for something
500 Cigarettes.
>>6464764Thirty dollars from a stranger isn't earmarked for anything, so you circle back toward the grocery instead of home.The bakery case has one slice of something chocolate left under the glass, cut generous, priced like the store knows nobody's coming back for the rest of it. You get it without deciding to, the way you'd catch something falling, as well as some Fun Dip as you walk by the garish display they've set up on your way to check-out. You don't even like Fun Dip.Gary rings you up without looking, same as always, pausing — no scratcher — and doesn't say anything about it either. You appreciate he's never once needed an explanation out of you.You eat the cake on the bench outside, the plastic fork doing its damndest. Nobody walks by. Two years since you last did anything for this specific day on purpose. Better than the freezer version, for what that's worth. The Fun Dip stays in your pocket.By the time you're done sitting there doing nothing in particular, the light's gone properly gold and you've got about five hours left before your shift.A) Head home. Actually rest before eleven.B) Walk the long way past the building off the highway — see it in daylight before you see it in the dark.C) You've broken pattern twice today already. Keep going, find something else to do with the hours.D) Just head to work early. Nothing better to do with the time anyway.
I've wasted a lot of time today on not resting. Getting s couple hours of shut eye won't hurt.
>>6464861Not resting hasn't done you any favors today, thirty dollars or otherwise. A couple hours won't hurt. That's the plan, anyway.You dream in fragments, the sugar-crash kind that eventually end, but not before it's done with you. A switchboard with every line dead except one, and that one's already answered — receiver hanging by the cord, nobody on either end saying anything into it. A wall of nines where a clock should be. Something cold sits close enough behind you to notice the sitting, patient in a way nothing patient has ever needed to be. Farther off, and getting less far by the hour, calliope music plays through a mouth full of broken teeth, a faint red glow, burnt sugar thick enough to taste through your own teeth. You stand extremely still through all of it. You get the distinct impression that's the only reason none of it has noticed you yet.Two hours turns into five without asking for permission. You come up out of it hard and the first coherent thought you manage is that it's dark out in a way two hours doesn't explain.No shower. Boots, jacket, the flashlight. You're out the door, late for the first time in two years of doing this.Chain-link, weeds in the lot cracks, a name over the door too faded to read. Technically it stopped being a real telephone exchange decades before you were born; unofficially, some of the old lines are still live on the emergency network, which is also, so far as you understand it, why you have a job at all. Insurance on that much exposed copper wants a warm body on-site after dark, and lateness aside, you're it.Tonight it's the smell that's off — sugary, scorched, funnel-cake-adjacent, nothing on this property should smell like that. And the side gate, which has needed a key from you every night for two years, standing open on its own.Around back, by the service panel: three of them, teenagers or close to it, face paint on like nobody taught them and nobody cared, camo that doesn't match camo, a hatchet charm doing a lot of work as a fashion statement. One's already got bolt cutters through the fence proper. Another's vibrating slightly, wired on something that isn't just nerves, talking too fast about how "the Caravan's gonna hear about this one." None of them have clocked you yet.A) Step out and announce yourself. See what three amateurs do when the warm body actually shows.B) Hang back and watch a minute. Get a read on how serious this actually is first. C) Just call it in. This is exactly the kind of thing you're not paid to handle personally.D) Ask them to leave. Politely. It's worked on stranger things than teenagers so far today.
>>6464903>A“Before you ask, yes they do give us guns.”
>>6464953Three amateurs buzzing on gas-station candy don't strike you as worth the patience. You step around the corner into the light instead."Before you ask, yeah, they give us guns." You say loud enough to carry.They don't, actually. The paperwork requires you to supply your own means of self-defense, which you decided a long time ago the flashlight technically covers — heavy enough, built wrong enough, and nobody's ever pushed back because it never came up before now. You're finding out in real time whether it holds.All three of them clock you at once, and for a second nobody moves — not you, not them, not even the one still elbow-deep in the fence with the bolt cutters. Whatever's happening behind their eyes isn't instant, which you choose to read as a good sign, mostly because the alternative is worse. Then the jittery one — the one who's been going on about the Caravan — drains the last of a can that is very much not soda and comes up loud, arms out, informing the parking lot at large that they are not, under any circumstances, running from a rent-a-cop. The other two look considerably less sold on that plan.Fence guy hasn't decided which way tonight's going yet, cutters still hanging half-through the chain-link like he forgot his hands were doing something. The third hasn't said a word this whole time, just watching you.Three of them, one exit they clearly haven't planned past, and a flashlight suddenly doing a lot more work than its warranty probably covers.A) Double down. Reach for your hip like you're about to prove it, and see if anyone actually wants to find out.B) Let the mouthy one keep talking. See where the bravado runs out on its own.C) Go for whoever's still actively cutting the fence. That's the real problem here, gun or no gun.D) Order all three off the property and hope sugar-logic still listens to a guy who sounds confident.
I order the three to leave, telling them that I don't want to hurt three kids, even if my job allows it. They don't need to know the truth of what's allowed. I take a step forward, telling them to leave before things get serious.
>>6465108You don't want to hurt three kids, and you make a point of saying so out loud, even though technically — as far as they know — that's an option currently on the table. "You've got about ten seconds to be somewhere else," you say, and take a step forward.It almost works. The quiet one's already backing up before you finish the sentence, and the mouthy one's face does something that might be reconsidering. Fence guy's the one who doesn't handle it well — flinches hard at the step forward, yanks instead of cuts, and the last few strands of chain-link give all at once.Something behind the fence answers that with a sound this building has never made in front of you before — a short, ugly crack, blue-white for half a second and gone before your eyes finish adjusting to it. The funnel-cake smell now overpowered by ozone. All three of them freeze, and so do you.Fence guy's staring at the cutters in his hand like they acted on their own. Nobody's running yet. Nobody's cutting anything else yet either. Whatever just happened back there isn't done deciding what it wants to do next, and neither, now, are any of you.A) Get the kids clear first. Whatever's sparking back there can wait thirty seconds.B) Get eyes on the panel yourself. If something's about to catch, you need to know now.C) Push the bluff while nobody's thinking straight enough to test it. Tell them this is exactly the kind of thing that gets people shot.D) Call this in for real. Three kids and a live wire stopped being a one-guy problem about ten seconds ago.
>>6465118>D
>>6465386"Copper theft in progress, three individuals, possible electrical damage to the service panel" — dispatch actually picks up on the second try, and you're most of the way through giving your location when the spark behind the fence stops being a one-off thing.Whatever's back there arcs again, longer this time, and the entire block goes dark all at once without so much as a flicker. Streetlights and porch lights and the hum you didn't know you'd been listening to for two years suddenly gone. Your radio cuts out mid-syllable — the arc must have scrambled the area's RF without a second thought.The three of them don't need the dark explained to them twice. You hear more than you see — sneakers on gravel, somebody's mouth open and yelling about how the Caravan is going to hear about this, all three shapes gone over the fence and into the black before your eyes even finish adjusting. You let them go. You've got bigger problems than three amateurs right now, and one of them is standing directly behind you, filling the whole building.The emergency lights should be dead along with everything else. They're not. Down the long hallway behind you — the one leading back toward the rectifier room, the one you've never once had reason to walk the full length of in two years of shifts — they're coming on one at a time. Not flickering together like a breaker resetting. In order. Like something's walking the hall toward you, finding the switches by feel, and isn't in any particular hurry about it.You've got a flashlight, a bluff nobody's tested yet, and a building that just remembered it isn't only yours tonight.A) Follow the lights. Whatever's doing that, you'd rather find it than have it find you.B) Get outside. Wait for actual backup before you do anything that sounds like a decision.C) Try the radio again. Dead air is still better information than none.D) Stay put and watch the hallway. Let it come to you, if it's coming at all.
>>6465586>ADo it head on though so we find each other
>>6465905Sneaking was never the move, so you don't bother. The lights keep finding switches the whole way down, patient about it, like they've got somewhere to be and you're headed the same way. The rectifier room's at the end, door open — the one place you've never had reason to walk the full length of in two years.There's a reason now. It's warm in here in a way the rest of the building isn't — rows of battery cabinets humming low and steady, LEDs blinking their slow green rhythm. Curled into the bottom half of an open equipment cabinet, knees to chest, using a coil of spare cable as a pillow like it was designed for exactly that, is someone obviously not supposed to be here either.White cardigan over a turtleneck, buttoned all the way up. Long mauve skirt, not a wrinkle in it despite the cabinet. Boots with a single gold buckle each, tights — pressed and complete in a way that has nothing in common with anyone who ends up somewhere they shouldn't by accident. She dresses like somebody's grandmother and looks nothing like one — milk-pale, aggressively blonde, put together with a precision that reads more like math than anything else.It isn't a beauty you'd call attractive, not exactly — it's one you'd call correct. A face arrived at instead of grown into, an answer instead of an accident. That's the part that gets you. You've met plenty of good-looking people and none of them made your stomach do this — a small lurch, like a right angle that's very slightly wrong, and you can't say where.You've spent today letting every small wrongness go without much of a fight — a payphone that had no business ringing, a woman in a cardigan glimpsed once at the far end of a grocery aisle and gone before you blinked twice, lights finding their own switches down a hallway that's never needed them. Some part of you has apparently been keeping a private tally of it all without telling you, because right now, looking at her, that part goes very quiet and very still, the way you'd go still if the floor turned out to be a held breath. Your pulse is doing something you'd rather it wasn't. No word for what you're looking at. Professional enough that none of it shows. Costs you something to manage, more than anything else has today.Somewhere behind you there's still a cut fence, three kids who bolted with tools in hand, and a wire that's probably still live. None of that feels remotely urgent right now, which strikes you as, vaguely, its own kind of problem.Her eyes open before you've said anything, or made any noise, or done much of anything to warrant it. No startle in it. No moment where she has to remember where she is. Just blue-grey, immediately and fully awake, like she'd been waiting on a specific cue and you'd finally delivered it."It isn't supposed to have this much noise in it either," she says, already faintly put out about it, "and yet." Like the blackout was your doing specifically, and more than a little rude of you.
You get about as far as reaching for something like a normal response — this building's not supposed to have anyone in it, maybe, or are you hurt, or how exactly did you get in here — and none of it quite makes it out of you intact. Your hands take over instead, since apparently they've got more confidence in the situation than your mouth does. The Fun Dip. Still in your jacket pocket since this afternoon, forgotten there since before any of this started, out and open before you've properly decided that's the plan. You hold it out toward her mostly because you need somewhere, anywhere, to put your attention that isn't directly at her face.She takes it like she's not entirely sure what's being asked of her, which — from someone who was, thirty seconds ago, radiating total and complete certainty about the correct acceptable volume for a citywide blackout — is its own small thing worth noticing. She turns the little packet over once in her hands, inspecting it with the seriousness of someone handling evidence, before working out, apparently by trial, which end is meant to open.A pinch of the powder. Considered. Tasted. A pause that runs on a beat longer than it has any right to."This doesn't taste like anything," she says, and it comes out like a discovery, not a complaint. "It isn't even attempting to. Cherry doesn't taste like cherries. Grape doesn't taste like grapes. Every other manufactured approximation you people put in front of each other is at least trying and failing at something specific. This one never entered that conversation at all." Another pause, longer still, genuinely turning the thought over rather than performing the turning-over of it. "How novel."She catches herself a half second after saying it — something in her face resetting, like she's just remembered there's an audience — and smooths an invisible wrinkle from her skirt that wasn't there to begin with.You still haven't caught up to any of this — you're honestly not sure you're going to catch up to it tonight, or possibly ever — and somehow, already, you are the specific person who introduced whatever this is to Fun Dip. Both of those things are true at the exact same time, and neither one is doing you the courtesy of canceling the other out.A) Ask her name. You're apparently on a first-name basis with her regardless of whether you actually know it yet.B) Ask what she actually is. Plainly, directly, and brace yourself for however she decides to answer that.C) Let the moment sit for a second longer. Whatever just cracked open in your head doesn't close back up in ten seconds flat.D) Table this entirely. There's still a cut fence, a dead radio, and three teenagers with bolt cutters loose on the property, and those problems don't stop being real just because this one is stranger.
D!
