Post by Erik Mercer on Oct 31, 2015 3:45:29 GMT
ERIK LANE MERCER
FACE CLAIM: Jaco Van Den Hoven
---------------------------------
AGE: Nineteen years
GENDER: Male
ORIENTATION: Homosexual
GROUP: Wanderer
POSITION: --WE ALL HAVE A STORY...
what's yours?“I didn’t answer the naked hunger in his eyes.”
-Jamie Wyman
One day a man came across his tent. A few had before, though none as young as himself. There was just a shadow of a chestnut beard, scraggly, like weeds, across his cheeks and part-way down his knobby throat. His cheeks were sunken in. He was thin and tall and dirty. Toothy, too. There was a desperation to him that seemed to seep from his pores.
“Howdy, friend.” (A reminder that he wasn’t yet out of the state-that-once-was-Texas.) “I come an awful long way.”
Erik supposed most everyone had.
“Danbury, if you know it.”
He did not. “Nope,” he said, his fingers still stuck knuckle-deep in a rabbit’s open belly. The thing’s dead neck lay twisted around to stare at the stranger, where he’d left it. His pop had shown him how: he’d cut the line across the gut and pulled out the innards like pulling ribbons. Blood splashed his fingernails.
“Well,” he said, “you don’t mind if I rest my legs?”
“Guess not,” he said.
“Name’s Gerald,” says the man, and he sticks out his hand. He’s trying to shake his good hand, of course. Erik’s fingers grip the rabbit’s gray fur, its empty skin, and he drags it backwards like a wild dog protecting its supper. For a moment they stare. His eyes follow a glint around the stranger’s finger: a piece of jewelry, inlaid with white stone.
“We are not likely to salvage civilization unless we can evolve a system of good and evil, independent of heaven and hell.”
-George Orwell
-George Orwell
He met more dead men and women than live ones, though seldom more than once; Gerald he would come across again, lying in the dirt. His face was twisted. Blood that had peaked out the side of his mouth, browned in the sun. Any number of things could’ve got to him. Infected, probably. There were long lines made in the sand, and tears off his clothing: hands pulling, teeth tearing. They could swamp you, pull you under. Swallow you whole. Like his old home Cuttenshoot.
Like his friend here, flies buzzing around his exposed meat.
This time he pauses to crouch down. Erik pulls his sleeve back. He takes his hand. “Sorry, friend,” he said, pulling the ring off his finger.
“The coyote hides when the wolf howls.”
-Anonymous
-Anonymous
He went south.
Down, generally speaking.
Being a wanderer isn’t so much about winning battles. If you know what’s coming, you don’t have to fight. You learn the signs. You watch and wait. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. You follow a trail of death and pick up the spoils of the unfortunate. Then, if you’re smart, you sell them.
“Scrappers,” some called them (with a smidgen of condescendence, more often than not.) Thieves and scavengers.
Axios is bolder and more lively than anything’s he’s ever seen. The city is a different kind of test than the wastes; less raw survival, more nuance. He travelled back and forth between the outskirts and the heart of Axios, the only place he knew that was more alive than dead. It’s fascinating and exciting. The lights never go down like the sun does. The people here are dangerous still, but alluring, too, and some of them draw him in like shark bait.
Erik begins to thrive.
BEHIND THE MASK...
who are you really?
who are you really?
SAMPLE:
ME: *slaps on something entirely unrelated*
The Villa Blanque was a tall, handsome house that stood at the center of New Orleans’ social circles. Its grandiose pillars and spiraling staircases, its half-moon lawn, and checkered marbled floors, spoke of the robust architecture of the southern aristocracy. It was of a different nature from the artistry found in Paris and beyond, but then, so were most things; Louisiana was a place of great beauty, as well as a noisome cesspool of insects and, as local legend would have it, wandering swamp spirits.
The Madame herself had husbands who had dropped like flies, until settling upon the southern man who owned the property, though it was much hers as his, or even more. She was a domineering woman known for her glib and guile. Despite her dark hair thinning at her temples, and her wrinkles at the corner of her eyes, beauty clung on to life in her still…though it lived on more readily in her daughters. The three of them were gathered there. Their faces were shadowed by the wide hats on their heads. One by one they smiled, perfectly pleasant smiles, as they were announced.
“My daughters, Marie Louise Pauline, Louise Marie Laure, Jeanne Pierre Paulin Blanque.”
They were dainty things all, with their dark wispy hair and their eyes the color of glaciers, like their mother’s.
USERNAME: Day
AGE GROUP: twentyfive
EXPERIENCE: long........
WHERE DID YOU FIND US? NEOn
