Metastasis, Part II

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Scene Title Metastasis, Part II
Synopsis My friends forsake me like a memory lost
Date November 8, 2020

The ceiling fan has stopped turning.

It’s the first thing Kaylee Thatcher noticed when she woke up. Her pillow, damp with sweat, hangs partly off of the bed. Kaylee sits on the edge of the bed, legs swung over the side and head in her hands. In a way it feels like she woke up like this, sitting and holding her head. Though she recalls her eyes opening and seeing the motionless ceiling fan over her bed. She calls feeling overheated and kicking off her blankets. Her chest is tight with a nightmare she can’t remember.

Outside her bedroom window, the moon is nearly full. It shines a bright light into her apartment, one that casts deep shadows. There’s a warmer glow coming from the bathroom door, open a crack and the light still on. It’s easier to sleep at night with a light on, especially powerless as she’d become. The loss of her telepathy felt like losing an arm, leaving groping around in the dark trying to find her way. Tonight, it feels literal.

Tonight.

Kaylee’s eyes look to the clock beside her bed, and she has to squint one eye shut to read the numbers.


Kaylee’s Apartment
Raytech Industries Corporate Housing

November 8th
3:33am


It’s the 8th.

Greaaat…

A part of her had fool-heartedly hoped to sleep through the day, knowing full well it wouldn’t happen. It was one of her least favorite days of the year, not that she was the only one that felt that way. It was a cursed day. The last one marred with the memory of the exploding spaceship. That was only the most recent event.

Squeezing her eyes shut to ease the strain of trying to focus on the brilliant orange numbers, Kaylee sighs out a groan and rubs at the ache behind them.

Getting back to sleep was going to be rough. She knows it when she snags the pillow from the edge of the bed. Already wakefulness was edging into her mind. Ugh. She seriously thinks about just laying back down, but that sticky feeling from sweating changes her mind.

Instead, she just tosses the pillow back into its proper place and gets out of bed instead. Even in the dark, Kaylee knows where things are as she shuffles her way to the bathroom, with a stretch of limbs above her head and a big yawn.

Maybe splashing some water on her face will make Kaylee feel better. She even considers knocking back a few of the sleeping pills she was prescribed…. or just aspirin.

Yeah, that is what she’d do. Aspirin won't make her sleep half the day away. It won’t get her back to sleep, but maybe another attempt at understanding the latest findings of their conditions will do that. Of course, even as she thinks about that, her mind drifts back to the fan and the gaping silence. The small squeak it gave with each turn had been a strange comfort.

What was the number of maintenance? Clearly she’d have to get someone to check out that ceiling fan, even though the place wasn't that old. Fuck.. it’s too early for responiciblity.

The bathroom light burns Kaylee’s eyes, causing her to wince when it comes on. She squints against the glow of the bulbs over the sink, but as she looks at herself in the mirror and her eyes adjust to the light she can immediately see that something is wrong. Kaylee can see a ring of dark red around her right iris, spreading out in dark veins across the whites of her eyes. There’s a large blot of crimson intruding into her iris, like a burst blood vessel.

The sight of herself in this condition is harrowing.

There is no stifling the gasp that escapes Kaylee when she finally gets her eyes to focus on her blurry form. Gripping the edge of the counter with one hand she leaned as close to her reflection as needed to get a clear view of what was going on.

“What the f—?” She whispers under her breath, quickly covering one eye and then the other; noting quickly that whatever was happening it was affecting her vision, leaving the world a blur. Fingers begin to tremble as she pulls gently at the edges of her eye trying to see how extensive the spider work of red goes.

Pulling back, she covers her mouth with her hand as panic flashes through her and curls in her stomach making her feel nauseous. Her mind in a whirl of thoughts. Oh god.. oh god.

If it had been a normal night and she hadn’t been abducted and been turned into a walking experiment, Kaylee might not have been freaking out at the moment. But she had and she was. “Fuck.“ The world blurred a little further as tears start to fill her eyes.

What do I do?

Her phone. Kaylee needed to text…. Text who? Dr. Pride? Dr. Miller? Dr. Yeh? The woman ponders this as she hurries back to her bedside to fumble for her phone.

As Kaylee fumbles with her phone, she realizes she’s not alone in her bedroom any longer. She catches the silhouette of someone sitting on her bed looking directly at her. The close proximity and her current state of panic is enough of reflexively cause Kaylee to scream and jolt back, phone tumbling out of her hand to bounce off of the bed and then onto the floor.

The figure in the lightless bedroom isn’t large and turns their face just so that Kaylee can make out the shape of a soft cheek and small jaw, the glint of light from the bathroom in a pair of otherwise inscrutable eyes. Kaylee’s chest tightens and her head swims as a sudden wave of nausea-inducing vertigo sets in, causing the apartment to feel like it’s twisting upside down. The walls of her bedroom stretch outward like a dolly camera trick from the Hitchcock movie Vertigo.

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As her bedroom walls expand, Kaylee is thrown into the unreality of her situation, as if it were a dream but feeling so dreadfully real. The girl on the bed — and it is a girl — is more visible somehow now that the room is larger. The furniture is larger, or—

Kaylee is smaller?

The girl Kaylee can barely make out is crying, she can tell as much from the glistening of tears on her cheeks, hands over her ears. It’s in that moment that Kaylee realizes why it’s so quiet. She can’t hear anything, not her own breathing, not the room, just a tinnitus whine.

She’s deaf.

With a groan, the former telepath sinks — none-to-gracefully — to her knees on the floor when the world tips oddly. It was nausea inducing. A trembling hand grips the edge of her dresser, even as she presses her back to it. Using it like it could steady her and right the world, while her wide blue eyes…. They never leave the child on the bed.

It wasn’t Carl… then…

“Who are you?” Kaylee asks, unable to resist the urge to reach a hand towards the girl on the bed.

Or that’s what Kaylee thought she asked, but she realizes that all she feels is the attempt at sound… the vibration of words as they travel through her skull. Her hand jerks back as she realizes that she’s gone deaf. Her chin trembles as a fresh wave of fear sinks it’s claws in that much deeper. What’s happening to me?!? She wails silently against the high pitched tone within her head, while tears blur the silhouetted girl on the bed.

Are you doing this? Kaylee tries to ask the child on the bed accusingly, it’s impossible not to try and talk, habits and all.

The light to the bedroom switches on, and Kaylee’s eyes adjust painfully to the blinding light. Her vision blurs, and she can tell someone was standing in the doorway; a man with glasses.

Edward.

She knows him without even being able to see, knows his concerned voice as he asks, “Kaylee? Are you alright?” There’s a sobbing now, sound, no longer deafened as the girl pulls her hands away from her ears. Edward isn’t addressing her, doesn’t see her. He’s kneeling on the bed, wrapping his arms around the crying, blonde girl.

Wrapping his arms around Kaylee.

“It’s okay baby, daddy’s here. It was just a bad dream…” Edward says as he strokes his hand down the back of her hair, and through what feels like tears all Kaylee can see is a disconnected blob of shapes and colors.

Kaylee might be able to hear again, but she is rendered completely speechless when she hears her father’s voice. It’s a sound ingrained into the very fiber of her being. She holds perfectly still, even though eyes follow the blurred form, struggling to see him clearly and worried if she moves the moment will vanish. No matter how much she disliked him… he was still her father.

When he kneels, Kaylee is struck with the realization of who the girl is. Something is wrong though. “I don’t remember this,” Kaylee whispers to herself in confusion. Or does she? All she knows is her father wasn’t a part of her life. He left her with her mother. Abandoned her.

Eyes blink furiously against the blurriness, hands scrubbing at them furiously trying to clear up her vision. Kaylee felt like she needed to see this. Was it even her memory or that of some other world?

Kaylee’s hearing becomes muffled, as though she were underwater, but she hears enough to pick out the little girl saying a single word. One word that sends a knife of panic through her chest:

Tornado.

All the lights go out, throwing Kaylee back into the bedroom she remembers. Her vision blurs on its edges, a haze of green-blue migraine blind spot drifting in front of her right eye for a moment. Vertigo hits her harder and she feels sick to her stomach and is struck by what she hopes is a sensory hallucination of centrifugal force, like she’s spinning in a fast circle. But the room is still.

There are so many questions, ones that can’t be answered, but it doesn’t matter, because the world is flipping on its ear and then quickly twisting it’s way down the toilet. Something that she found herself desperately needing as bile rises in the back of her throat.

However, as Kaylee moves to crawl towards the… vaguely remembered direction of the bathroom, her body has a mind of its own.

With a pained groan, Kaylee finds herself laying on her stomach on the floor, finger nails threatening to bend and snap as she digs them into the carpet, gripping at it in hopes of getting the world to stop spinning! Yet as her face presses to the floor the fibers feel wonderfully cool on her cheek, even if they even prickle at her cheek and start to feel damp from tears.

It’s an odd sensation to have the world spinning and yet stay perfectly still, opening her blurred eyes again, she vaguely sees the teal of her phone laying on the floor. She needed help, but her body didn’t want to move.

Her throat works as she tries to gain control of her voice. “Help!” She tries to call, even though no one will hear it, but it only comes out a groan again.

Laying on the floor, screaming for help, Kaylee feels more helpless than she ever has. Robbed of her telepathy, stripped of her dignity, she is thrown into a tempest of confusion and dread the likes of which haven’t existed for her since before the war.

But she can feel the vibration in the floor, of thundering footsteps, of a security detail responding to cries of help registering over internal security monitoring systems. She can see, blurry, the light of her apartment door opening, muffled voices calling out.

But clearly, as if lips were pressed to her ear she hears a voice echoing from somewhere, sending chills down her spine.

Schlafen.

Sleep.


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