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Who: Emil and Jovan
When: June 11th, after 9:30 PM
Where: The streets of Locke City
What: Two idiots getting caught in a blackout

Emil is heading back from the meeting on the alien ship. They’ve discussed… stuff. He isn’t sure what exactly, because he was busy taking pictures of everything on the freaking spaceship he was on an actual spaceship HOW COOL IS THAT. He’s eager to get home, to look at the pictures again in peace (did we mention SPACESHIP) and figure out the new Echo he got. It wasn’t a memory and as far as he can tell there’s no physical change, so Emil concludes he must’ve gotten a new ability.

After five minutes of walking though, all the lights around just turn off. Emil, who was walking quickly, is caught by surprise and trips over a crack on the sidewalk, falling flat on his face. Ow. He scrambles to his feet and digs in his back pocket for his phone, only to drop it like a winner. He curses and crawls around blindly for a few moments - just where is the damn thing, he can’t lose it now, not in this dark with all the pictures still on it…

Aha, found it! Emil lets out a sigh of relief and stands up --

-- only to hit his head on a car bumper, so hard he thinks he heard it crack.

”MOTHERFUCKER!”

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The blackout had taken Jovan by surprise as well. (When does a blackout ever NOT surprise somebody?) This late at night, of course it's obvious and eerie, and that alone is enough to set him on edge as he walks down the street. But then he hears a slight commotion--a thud, a clatter, and then--

"MOTHERFUCKER!"

Jovan freezes, too terrified to move anywhere lest the disembodied voice see him. All he can manage is to squeak out a "H-hello?" Which, as far as he's concerned, is the bravest thing he's ever done in his life.

A couple of things happen simultaneously - Emil’s hat falls off from the hit, the sensation of another Echo washes over him and someone calls out to him in the dark.

Crap. Talk about bad timing. He feels around for his hat and sets it back firmly. When no memory comes up, he pats himself, looking for possible outside changes. Only when he decides there are no extra appendages, does he call back.

“Yeah!” Emil turns his phone on and steps toward the voice, a little hesitantly. The guy sounds more freaked than him but you may never know, it could be a trick. He’s heard about people pretending to be in trouble before, only to attack innocent people who were just trying to help...

“You’re not gonna rob me, are you?”

He could play this up. He could try and sound tough like this is his turf, and if this twerp doesn't get out immediately, he'll have hell to pay. But if this guy doesn't chicken out and actually comes looking for a fight, Jovan would be infinitely more screwed.

He'd rather take another broken arm than have his head cut off, or whatever it is thugs who are scared of being mugged around here do. But still, if he just says "no," who knows what sort of beating that might be inviting...

"Why are you asking?" he says, voice hesitant and cautious. It's a miracle he doesn't stutter.

“Why am I - ‘cause I don’t wanna get robbed! What kinda question is that?”

Seriously, that’s a suspicious reaction if he’s ever heard one - and exactly what a cunning criminal trying to sound harmless would say. Unfortunately, Emil’s house is this way and like hell he’s taking a detour in this dark. He should be strong enough to take out a robber, right? Worst case scenario, he’ll flip a car at him.

“Look, I’m coming your way so - so don’t do anything funny,” he says, trying to sound confident. “If you do I’ll - I’ll be seriously pissed!”

He sucks in a breath walks toward Jovan, hoping to everything that he doesn’t have a gun. Once he’s close enough, the small light from his phone reveals a willowy teen in a baseball cap, staring at Jovan with blood red eyes (that Echo changed his appearance after all).

Jovan was already standing ramrod straight, hands up in the air as a peace gesture, since he knew full-well that he wouldn't be able to handle anything this guy threw at him. Might as well just make it clear that he's harmless and useless from the start, rather than provoke him somehow.

But when he spots Emil's red eyes, he goes even stiffer, eyes wide in caution and terror. What the hell is he dealing with, and how fucked is he right now?

Emil quirks an eyebrow at Jovan’s raised hands. If he’s really a robber, then he’s doing some fine damn acting. The guy isn’t just nervous, he looks downright scared.

“Hey man,” he says casually, waving the hand holding the phone. “You okay there? I’m not - “ a sudden chill stops his train of thoughts, and he shudders. What’s with the goosebumps, it’s hot outside and oh wait he has something to say to Mister Deer in Headlights here.

“I’m not gonna rob you or anything so uh. Relax.”

His hands hesitantly lower to about waist level, but he's still watching cautiously.

It's another few moments before he chances saying anything. "Are...are you on the--you know--" he lowers his voice to a whisper, "the network?"

Emil’s immediate reaction is to grab his hat and make sure it’s still hiding his horn. It is, and he’s relieved, but how did he know?

“Um,” he says, looking shifty. Everyone knows about the Numbers now, but do normal people know there’s a network? Emil can't remember.

Eventually he settles on: "Are you?"

Jovan clearly did not think his question through, because he's now put himself in a position where he has to admit his network membership yet again. He really needs to stop doing that.

Too late for that now, though. He hesitates for a split second before he starts nodding, a small, jerky movement.

Emil let out a sigh of relief. "Right, okay. Yeah, I'm one the network too so." He looks Jovan up and down, noting his nervousness and smirks a little. He's quick to slip back into brat mode once he feels there's no danger.

"Seriously, relax, you look like you're gonna cry." He waves the hand holding the phone. "How did you know I was on the network?"

His brow furrows a bit in confusion--isn't it obvious? It's a pretty clear indicator and all. He lifts one of his hands to gesture to his general face area, and to clarify, says, "Your eyes."

There’s a sinking feeling in his stomach. His eyes? Hurriedly, he turns on the phone’s camera and holy shit his eyes are red, he looks like a demon and that’s absolutely terrifying.

Emil screams, realizes it’s a very bad idea in this dark and starts whispering instead:

“What the fuuuuck.” He stares at Jovan. “They weren’t like this when I left the house today!” Somehow it’s important that the guy gets it.

Both of Jovan's hands lift up again in a placating gesture of peace. The last thing he wants is a network guy with red eyes (and probably super destructive superpowers, that seems to be a fairly common thing among them) freaking out at him and not clearly understanding that Jovan is weak and pathetic and entirely unable to do any damage, so why even bother hurting him.

"I-I get it, I get it! They weren't like that before!"

Emil is still freaking out here, staring at his own terrified face on the phone. He squeezes his eyes shuts for a moment and when he opens them - nope, still red like a demon from hell.

“I can’t go home like this,” he tells Jovan, not asking for sympathy, just needing to say something. “What if we have electricity again before I get there, people are gonna see, I don’t have sunglasses - ” he knows he’s rambling but he can’t help it. The only thing that stops the word vomit is another chill running down his spine, followed by a sudden fit of dizziness. To Jovan, it might seem like he just had a seizure.

Emil takes a step back, wondering if he psyched himself into getting sick. Then he smells something sweet.

“What’s that smell? Perfume?” He sniffs the air, grateful that he has something else to focus on. “Dude, are you wearing a ladies’ perfume or what?” He asks Jovan.

Jovan frowns, confused and affronted. "Of course not, why would I be wearing perfume?"

He can't deny that he smells it too, and he turns around, trying to get a handle on where it's coming from. It's definitely not coming from Emil, so...

Jovan swallows thickly, pointing with a hand that is starting to shake in the direction of the scent. "I think...someone else is over there."

Emil is just as nervous as Jovan, but does a better job at hiding it.

“Who’s there?” He calls into the darkness. At first there’s no answer, but then there’s a giggle and what sounds like a girl talking, though he can’t make out the actual words.

“I said WHO’S THERE!” Another giggle. “Don’t laugh, that’s super rude!” It’s really quite fortunate he gets angry easily these days, the annoyance helps ignoring the fear. He starts to walk toward the voice and turns back to Jovan after a few steps.

“You coming?”

Jovan was not coming, no. Generally when weird and shady shit starts happening, he prefers to get out of dodge, given that the last time, he was nearly killed by a naked giant who dropped a building on top of him and trapped him in rubble for nearly seven hours.

But now that Emil has beckoned for him, he can't just say no, can he? The words catch in his throat and after a few seconds of trying to force them out, he just gives up and nods as he starts to follow behind him.

Emil leads the way bravely - that is, he pulls his baseball cap down and lowers his head as much as he can while still watching where he’s going. He’s trying to hide his eyes but mostly it makes him look suspicious as hell.

The smell and the voice grow stronger, until Emil turns a corner and -

”Fuck!”

- almost bumps into a glowing sphere, hovering at his eye level. The ball turns around slowly, as if to watch him. It’s one of the creepiest things he’s seen in his life.

Jovan doesn't come to as abrupt a stop, since he had the chance to spot Emil come to a grinding halt moments ahead of him. Instead, he takes one more tentative step to squint at whatever it is that Emil's body is half-blocking from this angle. When Jovan recognizes it, though, he slumps a little and groans loudly.

"Christ, this again?"

"You knows what this thing is?"

He steps back to stand besides Jovan, eyes still on the ball. Then he takes another step back. Not because he's scared or anything, that's ridiculous. He just thinks that if Jovan knows what it is then he should be the one to handle this. It's common sense, nothing more.

He resists the urge to be a snarky asshole.

"It's been following me for months--ever since the snake attack." It took him a while to realize he hadn't overdosed on marijuana, a panic that he'd shared with the network. He gives the orb an unimpressed look and crosses his arms. If it thinks it can intimidate him, it's got another thing coming. Panicky, broken-armed, still-kinda-high Jovan is a thing of the past. Mostly.

"...wait, you mean you can see this thing?"

“Uh, duh. It glows in the dark.”

Courage bolstered by Jovan’s indifference, he skitters forward, going left and right to see if the orb keeps following his movements.

“So is it like, one of your echoes? Does it always sound like a creepy little girl?”

"What? No!" Jovan looks horrified by the mere suggestion that the orb belongs to him. Also, confused, because he's never encountered this one before.

"I've never seen this one before in my life! Usually it's a bunch of other ones floating all over the city trying to--to get cozy with me, o-or something. No one else has never noticed them before." So forgive me for being a little surprised at you finally getting a look at them!

“No one, really? Maybe it’s like, a Numbers thing or something.”

Though that doesn’t explain why they follow Jovan in particular. You’d think someone else would mention it on the network…

Anyway, Jovan seems too upset to give a proper answer and Emil doesn’t feel like coaxing it out of him. Maybe he should just ask the orb.

“Hey uh, mister glowing ball thing? Do you like, want something? Are you and your friends trying to get… cozy with this guy?”

"Not even you--Numbers people have noticed them! It was just--just me." He quietly leaves out the part where he thought he was losing his goddamn mind and hallucinating them all, and the part where as weird as this is, it's very relieving to get confirmation that it's not just his brain trying to fuck with him.

After Emil poses his question to the orb, he also follows up with something else, in a slightly quieter tone of voice. "...and they don't talk. Not really."

Emil doesn’t get to think why the specters have suddenly decided to show themselves to other people, because the moment Jovan claims they don’t talk the orb prove that it’s a special one. The timing is absolutely perfect.

It turns from Jovan to Emil and says in the same disjointed, creepy little girl voice: “T-ta...lk. N...ot c-c-ozy.”

Emil finds himself rooted to the ground. He’d probably scream if his mind wasn’t frozen with horror.

While Emil can't scream, Jovan does a little bit. It comes out a little more like a choked squeak, though.

"Oh, now you can talk?! Why didn't you--you things say anything to me the first 80 times I tried asking you what the fuck you were?!"

He might be freaking out a little.

There’s a chance Jovan will be freaking out even more, because the orb grows a mouth. A human mouth with thick, red lips and really bad teeth.

“D-di...ffrent… now,” says the mouth. “D…on’t c-all us… th..in-ngs.”

That snaps Emil out of his stupor. Watching the orb triggered a memory, something about ghosts and an evil clown. It leaves him extremely upset and combined with just how creepy the orb is, he can’t take it anymore.

“Don’t yell at it!” He stage-whispers and grabs Jovan’s arm. “What if it’s gonna attack us ‘cause you were being rude?!”

Oh my god oh my god oh my god, what the fuck what the fuuuuuuuck

Jovan is now clutching at his hair, grimacing and on the verge of tears. This is too much. This is beyond his weirdness threshold. Oh god, he wants to cry and puke all at once.

Instead, he forces himself to swallow.

"Look, I--just don't kill us! Don't debone us like fish and wear our skins as fleshy funsacks for you to parade around in to pretend to be average, normal, not freakish whatsoever human beings!"

He is trying really hard to beg forgiveness, but between this display of horror and trying not to cry and the hard pounding in his chest that feels just like an echo, it's not easy.

Panic is infectious. Now that Jovan gave him that lovely mental image, Emil is starting to lose it.

“Y-yeah!” He squawks. “We’re really sorry so don’t - don’t wear us and don’t make necklaces out of our entrails! You really don’t wanna wear me, look at my eyes, they’re red, that’s not normal! And this guy -” He improvises, trying very generously to help Jovan, “this guy has a tail, you just can’t see right now ‘cause it’s in his pants! We’d make shitty disguises!”

Jovan has precious little to add to this conversation--a very one-sided conversation, at that, given that he and Emil are so busy squawking to cover their asses that the ghost-thing has no opportunity to get a word in edgewise.

He's also so terrified out of his wits that he hasn't realized he's received an echo during this encounter, one too subtle to really catch on to even if he were attentive at the time. So as a result, he doesn't realize the lapse in his brain-to-mouth filter when he says in a quavering, terrified voice:

"T-the tail is my gargantuan dick!"

Congratulations, Jovan. It’s pretty hard to make Emil shut up but you’ve done it. He stops his frantic apologies to give Jovan a flat stare.

“What the hell are you doing?” He hisses. “Don’t make it angrier, dumbass!”

His eyes dart back to the orb, but it seems to have liked Jovan’s statement, because instead of a mouth, it now reflects a - well, a gargantuan dick.

Jovan chokes on air and stares.

It's very impressive. In a weird, obscene kind of way. And then, before he can shut his mouth:

"Is that functional? Is it--like, a real penis?"

"G-get o...ver here... see for yo-yourself," The orb croaks.

Meanwhile, Emil starts laughing, a laughter that's half amusement and half pure terror.

"What? No! I'm not a pervert!" He's too busy being shocked and disgusted by the accusation to remember to be scared.

"You s...started it," the thing remarks. If it had eyebrows, it would raise one

"Look," Emil says, "can you two stop talking about dicks? What kinda dumb ghost-thing does that?"

"Wh--well, this one, apparently!" Jovan gestures to the ghost orb. "I've never seen any other ghosts who are this..." Vulgar? Rude? Mouthy? How does he phrase this without offending the thing and possibly bringing down ghostly retribution upon them both? "...T-talkative."

“Maybe it’s like, their leader”, he suggests. “It sent it’s ghostly flunkies to watch you and now its ready to make contact.”

He looks Jovan up and down.

“Or not. You don’t look that special to me.”

Edited 2014-07-29 15:29 (UTC)

"Hey!" Jovan protests, although he doesn't know how exactly to continue from there. He just didn't appreciate the insult. In his mind, there are a million comebacks coming to mind, but none quite make it to his lips.

"I'm--y-you don't know that!"

Emil puts his hands on his hips. He’s thoroughly unimpressed by Jovan’s indignant reaction but hey, maybe he really doesn’t know that. You couldn’t assume things with the network.

“Hmm. Okay then. Do something cool.”

Well. He can't do anything to respond to that. After all, the only 'cool' thing he can do is fire off a lightning staff, which he's left at home like he always does, like some total idiot.

"W--I can see ghosts! I've been seeing ghosts. Is that not cool?"

"Eh," he shrugs. "It's pretty standard I think. I can see them too, so it doesn't count anyway." And by them he means just this orb, but that's good enough for him. "Can't you do anything else?"

Jovan seems to almost physically shrink, the way he hunches in on himself. "My--I, I have my lightning staff, but it's. I left it--it's at home."

Emil scoffs. “Lightning staff? Is it yours yours or did you just get one from that cranky old guy? ‘Cause I’ve got one of these too and if you got it from someone else it doesn’t count.”

He turns back to the orb. “Why’re you following this guy around? He’s lame.”

He lets out a small sound, simultaneously kind of hurt and kind of offended.

"W-well, at least I--whatever I--it's still following me instead of you! So--so there!

“Oh yeah? I --”

Emil pauses, brows drawing in a frown. This was clearly meant as a jab and he can’t just shut up about it, not when he’s obviously way more special than the other guy, but does he really want anything to do with the creepy orb thing?

“Don’t ‘so there’ me! Like I’d even want it to follow me around, it’s flashing itself! Maybe you like to be harassed by ghosts with giant dicks but I sure don’t!”

"What? They've--they've never flashed me before until you showed up!"

He can feel himself starting to blush and hates himself for it. Damn it. He's not used to arguing this sort of thing in person, in public. Face to face.

That’s too bad, because Emil is used to it, and charges right ahead. It’s probably a good thing it’s too dark to see Jovan blushing.

“What are you saying? Are you implying that I’m in some way attracting people - well, things - who engage in indecent exposure? Are you calling me a sick pervert?”

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i laughed out loud and also sorry for this tag

jesus christ

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i edit to fix the it's/its and end up adding a type, gj me

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