ORIGIN - well, a bomb went off in mexico today

Set some time after V-Selenite-One and V-Labradorite-One's Round 1...

Content Warning
This post contains potentially sensitive material:

death

graphic themes

dissociative episode

The backrooms of the arena were a bustling place of activity. Voices clamoring over one another. The stench of meat and sugary foods and roughage piled high. Stink and sweat and blood clinging to one's nares with such a pervasive intensity that it made one nauseous. Orb-light threw its pitiful little rays where it could, though looming figures and crooked-smiling little beasts blotted it out. Baubles and trinkets did what they could to compensate. Still, it was too bright.

And there V-Selenite-One was, hunched over with its knees pulled tight to its chest. Fingers—phantasmal and not—clutched at the joints between chitin. Clutched tight enough to peel it away with a jostled elbow, to prick skin and tender flesh and shred it apart. A shiver of revulsion curled through it, and it nearly toppled sideways. A palm stuck out to balance it, keep it from teetering away from the wall it leaned against, keep it from falling out of its hiding place, cloaked in shadows and so, so small.

Cold and coarse floor stung at its palm as it braced itself, and it recoiled like it'd been burned.

How long it'd sat here for, it did not know. Vargas had left once it reached the door. Chaos—no, Maximus Maximus Maximus remember that had looked over it, wove plants through its fingers, bound them in scraps. The man whose name it couldn't remember had offered to stay, but it didn't remember what answer it'd given. All of that was faded into a grayscaled smear, blitzed through with chromatic aberration.

Really, the whole world looked a bit dull, like that. Slow and fast at the same time. Shapes and figures gamboling past, sound simultaneously too much and too little. It hated the feeling of cool stone against its back, against its shoulder, but it did not want to get up and abandon its pillar of stability—its literal pillar.

Long ago the tears streaming down its cheeks had dried up, but a dry sob blustered from its lips on occasion, still. Its heart jackhammered in its chest and it wanted nothing more than to claw the treacherous thing out of its chest. Too fast, too slow, it still beat at its ribs and made its lungs seize in that uncontrollable and sore manner from before. Ears pinned backward, and it eked a hand away from itself to curl hooked—bloody, bloodstained!—claws into the stone.

From the shadow it'd attempted to melt into, pearly whites bared their grimacing frown and points of cyan haloed its glassy eyes, pupils shrunken to mere pinpricks.

A fist clenched, though there wasn't much substance to it; the selenite could almost imagine that there wasn't just one meager thumb on that hand. It'd been told not to disturb the bandage too much, but it could just nearly feel its fingers curling. A squint, and it could nearly envision their still being there, a corporeal phantasm against the rest of its body, and then—oh, cruelly then, gone in a blink.

Pain would rocket up its arm afterwards, of course, and its body would clench and tense with a shiver. Its magic would falter, and it would hurriedly pull the cloak of shadows back over itself with a soft, croaking yelp. Then, it'd fall silent, cowering within its own mental fog, blind to all the world around it.

V-Selenite-One, willing itself to disappear into the crevice between pillar and wall, everybody. Please dismiss as an aberration.

@V-Labradorite-One