NPC: Christine Visits Family
9/28/2005
05:12 PM
Logfile from GarouMUSH.
Currently the moon is in the waning Crescent Moon phase (31% full).
It is currently 17:07 Pacific Time on Wed Sep 28 2005.
[Christine pages: Her family is a very white couple living in a 70s colonial suburban home. Four other kids--a pair of four-year-olds, black, who look like they may be fraternal twins (Damien/Janelle), one white seven-year-old (Noah) that still looks nothing like the couple, and one twelve-year-old Chinese-looking girl (Mariah). All speak perfect English, though the little kids have Southern accents. Chaotic household. Very lively--not the kind of place you'd peek into and think "these people lost a child". Perpetual battle between the forces of anal cleanliness and childhood messes. Social workers perpetually checking up.]
Kent Crossing, East Side
The sparse buildings which rise around you could alternately be referred to as quaint, rustic, or ramshackle, depending on your point of view. Most are constructed of wood, rough mortar, or some combination thereof; they huddle just back off the potholed tarmac of Highway 22, most sporting wide porches upheld by old square-hewn columns and large signs with faded paint depicting their various purposes. Bushes and evergreens are scattered in amongst the buildings, as well as a fair amount of open dirt; to the south, a pair of rusted old train tracks meander their way out of the west and curve gently southeast through the forest.
Highway 22 runs east-west past the buildings, further into town to the west, or out of town to the east. An old, poorly-tended road weaves south into the trees. On the north side of the street, the local inn/tavern stands between the two other wooden buildings.
Contents:
Christine
Obvious exits:
Winter's Residence Small Blue House North Women's SHelter White Stag County Line Road West East
[look Christine]
She is an Korean girl of middling height and athletic build, in middle adolescence. Her black hair is cut severely straight, right at her ears, and the jaw that juts out below there is small and pointy. There's never a hint of makeup around her dark brown eyes, or her serious small mouth. She wears only a T-shirt, brandless jeans, and secondhand sneakers.
Grey skies drip with the light rain. More rain is assumed later for the night, and hence the people living in Kent Crossing have brought their umbrellas to work, school and other outdoor activity. This doesn't seem to affect one young boy who revels in the wet weather, playing outside on the well kept lawn of a quaint cookie-cutter house recently built in the area of East Kent Crossing. "Noah! Noah get your butt inside before Mom gets angry!" calls another young girl from the doorway of the house. She has the tone of one scolding, but she's too young to be any sort of mother. And she looks nothing related to the boy given that she looks Asian and the boy, Caucasian. Yet, she somehow carries an intimate relation with him. Siblings, one might guess.
A car pulls over on the highway outside of Kent Crossing, to let Christine out into the rain. Her wiry figure is lost in a voluminous red poncho, its hood pulled far out over her forehead. Then the car's human driver is off, and a stream of water jetting from the hind wheel. Christine slogs down the highway. She looks at no one. And she's headed for that unassuming suburban house.
"Just a few more minutes!" "NOAH!" "Fine, fine." Noah the Disappointed starts in towards the front door, where the Chinese girl has already huffed and disappeared into the interior. Grumbling softly under his breath, the boy picks up the soccer ball he'd been kicking around and shakes his head quickly to loosen the drops of water dribbling down his mop of dirtyblond hair. The cars that drive past on the highway don't even receive a glimpse of attention.
Christine knows her way around here--knows, from years of hide-and-seek, where you can sit and watch home base without the danger of being seen yourself. She comes around the back way, slinking through soggy backyards, and she halts beside a length of wooden fencing on the adjoining property. This is the border, and she will not venture further. She presses her spine to the fence. She listens.
Upstairs, a window is open and from it the sound of somebody running up the slightly creaky stairs can be heard. "I'm back." A pause. "No, no my mom just told me to call my brother inside. Yeah, he was playing soccer outside /in the rain/." The teenage girl from before, Mariah, comes into view at her bedroom window with a cordless phone up to her ear. She laughs to some piece of unheard conversation. "Nu uh! Oh my god, are you serious? ... Oh he's soooo lucky Jackie wasn't there. You didn't know? Hm, I think they got together during, like, Valentine's or something. Ya I know! They've been together pretty long, but he's such a dork!" The conversation continues, chattering on with junior high gossips. Mariah seems to be getting on well. The backyard glass door opens, and the sound of a television and two young boys playing floats into the air.
Christine bows her head and runs her hand over the lenth of her face. Rainwater washes out the contours of her cheekbones. She leans towards the fence, one eye closed, one eye open. And there, where she knew there would be, is a gap between the slats. She has to bite her lip down to keep the sound of her breathing from echoing across the yard, it seems so loud to her...
Noah is back, still looking a little wet, but for the most part not about to trek water everywhere. A cream-color towel drapes around his shoulders, and he tosses the soccerball back into the back yard. The sounds of the young boys inside are even louder than Mariah's conversation upstairs, with shouts and cries of near unintelligable excitement. The TV is tuned to some channel with a cartoon, it sounds like, but from that angle it's almost hard to see. "Ok you two, break it up now," a middleaged woman with a soft but noticeable Southern drawl chides. The supposed mother of this diverse family. "Noah, I told you to go get dried off! Tsk, you're going to catch a cold like that..." "No I won't! Everyone at school's sick but I'm not!" "Be that as it may, you're not sitting down to dinner all sopping wet like that."
Christine leaves. She pulls away from the fence, while the woman who raised her chides the boy she was raised with, and she scuttles away from the property like a player in a new game of hide-and-seek, one in which she must not be found.
Noah starts to protest, but a flash of red between fenceslats gets the more perceptive boy's attention. He squints towards the fence, but is quickly drawn away by the towel from his shoulders getting dropped unceremoniously upon his head and rubbed with force. "Hey!" Laughter from both the woman and boy float along. Then the glass door slides closed, just as the woman turns to the younger twins still roughhousing on the living room floor. "Damien, Janelle, dinnertime!" Mariah continues talking on the phone, passing back and forth from view in the upstairs window.
Christine hops, with a listless playfulness, through someone's backyard swingset. She hops neatly over a pit dug for a pond, or a pool, and eroding rapidly. The voices grow muted behind her, and she's at the end of the block before the chorus of them is drowned. At the main street, she puts a hitchhiker's thumb out, and keeps her face down.
Cars pass by, some not giving the girl more than a second glance - some missing in their entirety. The rain increases in intensity, though gradually. No one seems to be intent on picking up suspicious hitchhikers in this part of town.
There are, now, few options open to Christine. Yet she finds a reserve of calmness in her that was not there before. If she can't get a ride, she can walk. If she can't walk, it won't kill her to sleep in the rain. The forest spreads welcomingly around Kent's Crossing--the forest is in every direction, at the eventual end of every road. She picks a direction, and makes her uneventful way out of the city of her childhood, and into the woods.
Back | Next | 2005 Logs | Main