Survival Of The Fittest

Beryl was unsure, where she was, what was being said? All that was clear was that they had an ensemble cast's worth of voices all on the wrong side of the door even if Demetri kept vanishing off their collective stage. Beryl stood there, wandering away in the metaphysical sense. Erika spoke to her in foreign languages and nose touches. That, at least, grounded Beryl 'til the action potentials all leeched away into the floor.

Mindless, floating. Beryl was probably the least drugged up of the people left outside the door? She was glad to be with familiar company for once, she would have guessed if she'd spared the situation another arbitrary thought.

... ,,You're cute." Speaking in another language was odd. If it wasn't a language her brain could speak in. She had to hear herself in every other language first, mountain echoing the words she could comprehend until she had the ones she couldn't.

Beryl followed the moon as the door opened, stepping just over the threshold and contemplating the innocently dull facade of a medicine cabinet. It looked back at her with her own eyes, and she focused with a musing hum.

"... Sure, it's a bathroom, but what exactly is that supposed to mean?" Beryl retreated a step until she bumped into both persons behind her at once, softly recoiled, settled into an orbit of her own unsteady connection to the earth called two feet. "We did open the door but I don't think we did what we intended to do?" She phrased the question as a shrug.

Erika continued to stare at the empty bathroom, the world going silent for a moment as she considered what has just occurred. The implications were stunning, and she accepted them without much critical thought. That was how the mind tended to be in moments like this - open to all possibilities, even the strangest ones. That was often the road to the most profound truths.

The Moon took her. Why would the Moon do that?

Maybe it was angry. That was a startling idea. Imagine if everyone just realized that the moon was angry? There'd be mass panic. Someone would have to talk the Moon down; metaphorically speaking, of course.

"How did we piss off the Moon? Luna's usually so chill."

Maybe it was the environment. The Moon just floats around and watches. It gets a front row seat at humanity being every kind of awful. We're doing so much damage. So much harm.

Her voice fell to a whisper, likely not audible to anyone except Beryl. "I understand, Luna. I understand where you're coming from. I feel it too."

If the Moon got really mad, it'd probably start taking more people. Maybe they'd never come back. That just wouldn't do. The surface of the Moon was inhospitable and pristine. An angry face on it would be really hard to ignore. Erika walked into the bathroom slowly, her hands out in front of her as if to show the Moon that she wasn't a threat.

Of course I'm not a threat. You're a stellar body, I'm just an Erika.

The gesture probably didn't hurt. She looked behind her, offering soft words of comfort to Beryl. "Don't worry. I'm gonna go talk to the Moon. If I don't come back you're uhh..." She shrugged. "You're all probably doomed. Wish me luck."

With that, she climbed out the window.

((Erika Stieglitz continued in The Mascara Snake))

Jackson and the two girls all stood at the door to the bathroom, looking inside in confusion. Jackson really didn’t understand what was so interesting about the inside of this bathroom, but as drunk as he was, he was willing to go along with the staring. At least it gave him something to focus his eyes on to stop the room from spinning. Beryl backed up abruptly and bumped into both him and Erika, before settling off to the side a bit. She seemed confused about what the room before them being a bathroom meant, and Jackson’s alcohol-drenched brain couldn’t wrap his head around what the fuck she was talking about. It was just a bathroom, right? What was so goddamn interesting? He felt like he was missing some important piece to this puzzle, but he didn’t have the faculties about him to ask any questions.

Jackson felt his brain begin to hurt even more when Erika starting rambling about how they pissed off the moon. What the fuck? Then she started to actually TALK to the moon that was visible through the window, and even Jackson wasn’t drunk enough to think that was normal. Jackson watched super concerned and confused as Erika slowly walked into the bathroom, and then suddenly she was talking about how she was going to go talk to the moon. Holy shit, what the fuck was going on?! Even through his drunken haze, Jackson felt like something very wrong was about to happen here.

Then Erika climbed out the window onto the roof.

Jackson’s panic sensors started to go off in his brain, and what little sense he could muster told him he couldn’t let this girl go onto the roof or she might fucking hurt herself. Jackson shook his head to try and clear out the cobwebs, and did the only rational thing he could think of. He took a step into the bathroom. Then another. Then a few more.

“Erika! Wait!”

And out the window he followed her.

[Jackson Sullivan Continued in The Mascara Snake]

Hm... the Moon, was it? Beryl had always off-key marveled at Erika's worldliness, but this seemed to be some grandiose evolution of such. Almost a non-sequitur, actually!

Beryl had whispered at Luna before, and she'd whispered back for sure... she being the moon or Beryl herself, depending on the specific conversational cues to be stringently not followed? Hard to say. All Beryl could guess at with any certainty was that there were less friends jumping out of windows in her prior visions of her past reality.

She leisurely meandered in a path longer than the straight line between door and window, and then she was looking outside. She could not see any of the people who had supposedly passed through already. They had since vanished into the parts of their stories she wouldn't cameo in.

"Please don't take her yet," she prayed. She spoke, less to the moon and more to the night air the moon implied. Her back wedged in between the wide open window panes, curling like a chrysalis yet unhatched. "Erika is good people."

Her soft smile, infinitely asymptotic to vagueness, flickered on and off. Much like the light switch she paid no mind. The electricity bill to be paid by the Quinn family carried weight by the second, same as Beryl as she accelerated with gravity's assistance, casually tossing herself backwards out of the windowsill.

wheeeeee, so on, so forth

((Beryl Mahelona?????))

((Demetri Futscher, continued from the previous page))

Hiding the evidence of the shit he'd broken had been a hard-to-gloss-over type of adventure, that was the fucking problem wasn't it? If he'd been a real man with a real sense of honor though, he would have admitted his mistake and offered to pay... Not like he was about to admit it, not with his face being attached to his body and all. Besides, Forrest was rich bitch Numero Tortellini. She could have afforded to replace the Futscher household's bathroom tiling more than they could have afforded one crummy screwdriver. So, he was logically justified in stuffing the damn evidence in a lonely corner of the garage and playing it scarce. It had only just occurred to him that at least three pairs of eyes had been witnesses.

Well, like, if any of the people involved could be qualified as having functional eyesight. Given extenuating circumstances and all.

Sulking up to that bathroom landing had proven...

Shit all. Everyone was gone. Door was open- another thing Demetri could count as 'you definitely did not achieve this you fucking bleeding vag of a loser'. He almost had to wonder if anyone who had been part of that cringeworthy scene had actually existed. Maybe they'd all been pranking him. Yeah, he was definitely egotistical enough to assume anyone cared enough to put together something that kind of way.

How had they opened the door anyways? Stupid crazy science girls. Kind of impressive and all. If they both hadn't been so tall he might have considered them 'will reject me offhandedly' fantasy worthy. But it was like: he wasn't about to fucking stack the deck against himself- it was hard enough as was, let alone when a pair of heels would make him the runt of the couple.

He wandered into the bathroom- nobody had bothered to clean up. He flicked the lights off and let the moonlight wash in. Next, the window.

He yanked. Hard, harder. A grunt.

It was stuck. Fucking hilarious.

Anyways, he'd learned his lesson from last time. No more trying to fix shit in this party. Better he just find somewhere else to try his hardest to not make an ass of himself?

((Demetri Futscher continued in somewhere far away from mr. right))