maskormenace | 003 - [Video] Happy Birthday, Chloe Price.

[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.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It is fortunate indeed. And yet the time you're missing, even, must seem like a chasm to you.

It seriously is.

But it helps that half the shit here is hella backwards. Cold war 80s bullshit is a hell of a throwback.

So you're saying it's easier because it's...distanced from your time, rather than mostly similar? I can see how that might be true.

I think...it just makes it easier to feel like there was a break between home and here.

So it's less confusing maybe.

I understand. It's far less difficult to confuse the rules of chess and solitaire as it would be to distinguish between different versions of poker. The differences lets you step back from your experiences here somehow, which considering how unpleasant they can be, is probably fortunate.

Yeah, that.

It'd be weirder if everything was the same except, you know, not my mom or anything.

And oddly personal.

The strangest thing for me was finding out that, not having existed here, I'd lost my commission in the RCMP. That was all I'd known before I came here so it really was some kind of shock.

The...Royal Canadian Mounted Police?

[Dude.]

You're a mountie?!

Well...yes.

[ The plaid isn't a suitable giveaway, is it? ]

I've grown used to people on the network not knowing what the RCMP are, otherwise I'd have made a more thorough introduction.

I'm from Washington man, we kinda osmos a lot of Canadian junk.

[Well, that and she watched a lot of TV.]

So what kind of powers do mounties get here?

Well I... My hat makes me invulnerable, and of course I can do this...

[ Fraser backs off from the video slightly, and transforms neatly into a blue eyed arctic fox, and then back again--it's a well polished ability. ]

More recently I've been able to generate ice with my hands. It's not very well practiced, I'm afraid.

...Wow.

All I do is make butterflies.

[That's half a lie.]

Well... I like butterflies?

Heh. So do I.

But it's not going to stop a bank robbery or let me fly or anything.

Well, maybe if you make enough of them, you can ride on them somehow...

003 - [Video] Happy Birthday, Chloe Price.

video;

video;

video;

video;

video;

video;

video;

video;

video;

video;

video;

video;

video;

video;

video;