003 - [Video] Happy Birthday, Chloe Price.

[helladoomed]

[It's a little after noon when Chloe turns her communicator on. She's sitting on an old white plastic deck chair, and from the look of the buildings behind her, probably on a roof somewhere in Nonah. She's in a worn old white tanktop with a skull on the front, her jeans-covered legs propped up on something, her coat hanging off the back of her chair. She's spent the morning avoiding people, not answering her texts, just...brooding. There's a cigarette between her lips, and she takes a drag off it before she catches it with her other hand, her attention mostly on the phone.]

You ever think about time 'n shit? Like, how it hella doesn't make any sense here? Like, okay, back home, before I wound up here, it was 2013 right? In October.

[She leans back in her chair, resting the phone on her leg, tilted up so all the screen really catches is her face and neck and the clouds.]

Suddenly I'm here, it's three years and a couple months later. Just, wham, welcome to the future except it's a weird fucked up cold war version of the future. And I get like, it's way worse for other people, right? Pulled from other centuries or other fuckin' planets with their own weird-ass calendars but.

Three years.

[She's not even really sure what she's going on about, honestly. She'd been puzzling this over in her head all morning and hadn't gotten anywhere, so maybe she thought rambling out loud would help. It wasn't really working.]

So here we are, right? March 11th, 2016. Shit had gone different, I'd be twenty-two today.

[She hesitates, her gaze distant, up on the clouds as she took another puff off her cigarette.]

Instead, I guess I'm twenty. Sort of. Minus a couple months. Still my birthday though. [And then she smirks, pointing the two fingers holding her cigarette at the sky.] Fuck you, universe. Chloe Price made it to twenty after all.

[She scooped up the phone again, and for a second is framed in the picture again, the camera half-covered by her thumb as she reaches for the disconnect. Her voice is quieter again.]

Didn't see that comin'.

[Click.]

Comments

voice;

[bassriff]

Happy birthday, dude.

[She isn't even going to. Touch. Most of that, for now. It's worrying, but... different angle.]

Glob, time's a flippin' nightmare here. [She laughs.] I don't even remember when my birthday is. You lose track after a while, you know? Time, dates, years...

voice;

[helladoomed]

Thanks.

[She's curious though.]

How do you lose your birthday? How old are you?

voice;

[bassriff]

18.

[beat]

Plus 980-something.

voice;

[helladoomed]

.........

You're a thousand years old?

voice;

[bassriff]

Surprise?

voice;

[helladoomed]

That's one way to put it.

Uh.

So.....

How's that work, exactly?

voice;

[bassriff]

I don't have to explain vampirism to you, right?

voice;

[helladoomed]

...Only the part where it's not made up for bullshit romance novels...

video;

[bassriff]

[yeah she's switching to video now. The light is actually on nearby, so Chloe can get a good look. Skin, teeth, ears, scars.]

Yeah, well, my world was crawling with vamps once. And most of them? Not really the wine and dine type.

Re: video;

[helladoomed]

Huh.

[Give her a second to process this.]

So that's a thing. So you like...eat people and shit?

video;

[bassriff]

No, I-- ugh. [she might have laughed that off a few years ago, but now it puts her on the defensive.]

It's not the blood, Chloe, it's the color. I eat red. [not that she hasn't lost control and attacked people before, but maybe it's not the time to remember what Crane did.]

video;

[helladoomed]

Red.

You eat a color.

[That just sounds kind of crazy, is the thing.]

video;

[bassriff]

[you see this, chloe? this is marceline staring unblinking at the camera. one day she won't have to demonstrate this.

marceline reaches out of frame, grabbing a strawberry from a bowl. She lightly bites into it, draining the color before discarding the whitish-gray husk. looking straight at the camera the whooole time.]

Yep.

video;

[helladoomed]

[That is a creepy, creepy gaze Marceline.]

...That's kinda freaky. I mean, it's probably friendlier than drinking blood but uh...yeah.

Freaky.

video;

[bassriff]

[well, she drops it, so there's that.]

Man, you don't see me sassing you about how you eat.

video;

[helladoomed]

[Chloe snickers and takes a drag off her cigarette.]

Feel free to bitch about it sometime, then. Next time I eat an apple by chewing instead of sucking on it or something.