@madeh0rror - Ciphra is there and not there with Billie. (Closed|Starter)
Her father’s house was a hard place to visit now, with too many memories wallpapered up the walls, even clustered across the sheets of fine dust. Dark, shadowed by lights that’d stopped working since his passing two to three years ago. It was a monument to everything he’d held together in life, and always in his own haphazard way. Like the cords only he knew how to make work, like their relationship, or his relationship with anyone really. She tried all of the temporary switches which he’d never covered or replaced, checked the cables behind every appliance he’d ever cured with ample helpings of tape. None of them would turn on anymore, and a part of her wondered how they ever did. He’d always made it look so easy, but was there actual magic behind that ritualized innovation? Had every extension cord been a pact with something beyond the surge of electricity? If ever there was a sorcerer in her family she could have believed it was him.
Night crept through the windows, but it had already been with her down in the basement. With nothing more than a flashlight to guide her, she stepped through the mess of useless contraptions, picking through shelves upon shelves of different sized gears. This place would never be hers, not really. Billie had inherited the building, but not its spirit. It was still his nest of wiry garbage, and no matter how much she’d scrapped from it already, the hoard only grew before her very eyes. Impossibly so. She had already come to terms with that reality a few months after his accident, but every so often she’d circle back to check, lured by the sad crowing of an empty home. Its doors open, waiting to shelter someone– not her, but him.
At least this would give her another chance to find trinkets for herself, maybe set pieces for her own designs. One of these gears should probably fit her new statuette of whirring parts.
Billie had shifted her grasp on the flashlight, trying to focus on the little bronze piece between her fingers, when she suddenly noticed the spread of goosebumps up her arm. No longer centered on her hand she realized she’d been sweating against the stark cold all the while, as if she were shocked or raving with adrenaline. She blinked a few times, let go of the flimsy thing and felt the patter of her heartbeat. Why was she anxious? Was she anxious? Another wave of something crashed through her and she turned around, believing someone would be there though all around her was as still and quiet as ever. There was nothing there.
But nothing does not necessarily mean nothing. Her eyes twitched and she rubbed them with the back of her free hand. Nothing there does not mean nothing there.
