🥊 𝚄𝙽𝙼𝙰𝚁𝙺𝙴𝙳 𝚆𝙰𝚁𝙴𝙷𝙾𝚄𝚂𝙴. — vi & jade [ closed starter 4 @bloodyglcry ]
Vi rarely entertained being lost. Never would ‘lost’ be a factually correct and fixed term to describe her lack of mapped awareness. Instead, it was a transient state to pass through. Being destinationless meant being immune to disorientation, always on the way to somewhere else because there would always be something to discover on the other side. That much was tried, trusted, and foolproof. Should she stray too far south, she’d end up at the airport; West, the mountains; North, another state park; East; Las Vegas Nevada Temple. It was the closest to a mathematical problem she ever willingly calculated – her direction and distance, two components in constant relationship flux: multiplication, addition, or subtraction. If one degree was added or removed, the resulting location changed completely. Head northeast, as Vi had most recently, and she would end up in an industrial district.
Between tumbleweeds, litter, and dust plumes, the sprawling city of steel and stone sleeps. In the late hour, looming warehouse buildings gleam ominously beneath moonlight, most barely utilized. Evidence of past lives are intermittent: padlocks, graffiti, gutted vehicles, dented sheet metal, fallen signs rejected by arid ground. Traces of reclamation, forced entry, or forsaken business models made the place feel like a ghostly version of the main strip. Too modern to be haunted, but far from vacant. It was easy to imagine that Vi was not alone. Easy for her ears to play tricks and interpret the whistling breeze as a collection of voices or laughter. Without a doubt nesters now resided in some of the seedier buildings, Vi avoids the repair shops and Artist-in-Residence pretences to gravitate towards one of the outliers, fairly plain asides from the rust and weeds which bloomed around its perimeter. But what really attracts her attention is the faintest eminence of light seeping outside, between door hinges and a finger’s worth of space below: stormguard bottom nearly threadbare, toothy with gaps like an ancient grin, dust and sand caked to the edges like forgotten crumbs in a beard. The light from within danced with shadows, scuffs, and tended something – someone? – more. The way all covert operations pulsed with magnetic attraction, before retiring for the night Vi was determined to investigate her hunch or be disappointed. Feigning casual normalcy, at first, Vi tried the front door. The handle shifts back and forth in her grip, one inch of give in each swivel. Locked. Shifting tactics, she snuck around the far side in search of a secondary entry point. Her curiosity is rewarded by a garage door with less reinforcements, plain and unremarkable. She bent down to tug at the handle, held her breath when it eased upwards without a hitch. Prying it open just enough to squat and duck underneath, her next inhale caught with thrill as she turned around to face what awaited her. Not disappointing at all.