parallel.
@neotaeoh / the afterlife, system failure, phase 2.
the club usually isn’t bright. that’s the entire point of it. a swamp of light green neon that permeates the room, flashes of spontaneous light, a neon show behind the bar like accent marks to the dim. but even those are gone now. and so is the music. without it, the club feels wrong. it’s purpose robbed from it. there’s a buzz of noise, and a wave of paranoia that circles the room. like a sway of an ocean, but more uneasy now. a calm before the storm rather than the frantic, collective crashing she usually expects from the place.
rin has half a mind to leave. she’s not so sure now why she came in. because it acts like a hub to elysium? because she expected some dregs of normalcy from it? but it all just feels eerie. maybe even worse than outside, on the streets. she finds herself hovering near the outskirts, back stuck to the wall. occasionally jostled by a miss-aimed shoulder of frenzied bodies as they shuffle past her. her jaw’s clenched. it feels like there’s white noise underneath her skin. the radio lines are too scattered now. she can’t make any more sense of what’s going on from the thin waves of police scanners she can pick up on. art of her wants to scatter, too. but she doesn’t. in times of stress, rin tends to root into place. lock-jawed, a strange look of being collected that never seems to match on the inside. she hates when people mistake it for strength. but in situations of panic, maybe it’s for the best.
it feels like separating cement from the ground when she turns to make her way back toward the door. but she’s distracted by a flash of metal on the way there. gears and steel and a familiar face. she alters her path, catches up the back of his shirt in a fist and tugs before he can disappear behind a crowd of packed bodies. “theo, what the fuck’s going on?” rin asks him when he whips his head around. if anyone might have an idea, he might be among them.