OOM and EP: Max Caulfield

[little_pieces_of_time]

(OOM: (Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.)

Breaking the early morning quiet of the bar, Max Caulfield stumbled backwards through the door, the impact sending the door swinging open to bounce off the wall behind it. Beyond its frame is a trashed dorm room, clothes and books strewn across the floor and with angry red graffiti scrawled across a photo collage wall over a twin bed.

With shaking hands, Max grabbed the door and shut it firmly, leaning against its solidity to brace against the dizziness that threatens to overwhelm her and trying like mad to regulate her shallow, frantic breaths into something that will calm her racing heart.

[oom content warnings include bullying, depression, reference to potential sexual assault, terroristic threatening]

Comments

[old_monster]

"So he is your master, and you are his disciples?" Ye Baiyi asks. "So you aim to be a great artist just like him?"

[little_pieces_of_time]

Max ducks her head, smiling as he cheeks color faintly. "I've heard that comparison before, and it's pretty accurate. I didn't exactly sleep outside his door until he caved and let me study under him, but I'm pretty sure he was the deciding factor in me getting the photography scholarship to attend Blackwell in the first place. I would love to be a famous artist like him, one day."

"He... says I have a gift." It sounds inspiring when he says it, anyway. "I just need to b-be brave enough to share it."

[old_monster]

"Famous, or great?" Ye Baiyi asks. "Which is more important?"

[little_pieces_of_time]

Max grins at him. "Great, of course. But fame certainly doesn't hurt."

They go hand-in-hand.

[old_monster]

"May I look at some of our work?" Ye Baiyi asks.

[little_pieces_of_time]

Max's grin freezes as she hesitates, her gaze slipping away and down towards the bar counter. That's the part of photography she has difficulty with, the sharing of her work. It's an integral part. Letting others see your photos is the only way to become known for your photography.

"Um." she says, eventually, pretending she doesn't absolutely look like someone being asked if they'd like to be beaten. "Y-you could. I... don't have them here with me, though. They're i-in my bag, back in my room."

Through the door. Which she will have to go back through eventually, she knows. She needs to clean up the mess before she goes to meet Chloe for breakfast anyway. It's just upsetting.

[old_monster]

"You don't have any copies on the little machine all people from your time seem to carry for games and work and talking to people?" Ye Baiyi says.

[little_pieces_of_time]

"Oh! Oh yes, I-" Max starts, her hands finding her pockets but not her phone. She checks again. "I-"

A chill runs through her. Max hadn't taken her phone with her to the shower, of course, but she hadn't thought to pick it up when she ducked into her room to grab Kate's book, either.

"Damn it," Max gets to get feet, genuinely angry on top of her anxiety. "They had better not have messed with my phone. It was in my room. Hang on."

As much as she dreaded opening that door again, she does so without hesitation. The threat is still there, blazoned in red across the wall of her beloved photos. Insults, less impactful, are scrawled across the nearby mirror. Max ignores them. She doesn't hesitate to step across crumpled papers and strewn books to cross the floor to check the bedside table.

[old_monster]

"That looks terrible," Ye Baiyi says. "Are you certain you don't want me to beat them up a little? As a treat?"

He smirks.

"Nobody will believe them that suddenly a sword immortal in white came down upon them and smote them, not even using his sword."

[little_pieces_of_time]

"You paint an increasingly tempting mental image," she admits, frustration tinged with relief as she finds her phone. It was still plugged in, but had fallen or been knocked between the bed and the wall.

"I'm not... worried about Victoria, at least not in my case," Max says, looking at the lipstick-written insults on her mirror. "She's just a bully, insecure and making it everyone else's problem. Nathan, though..."

She leans to pick up a crumpled print she had stepped on, and comes back to the door. It's a letter sized print, depicting Max's head photoshopped onto a platter of entrails and sheep's heads, her eyes scratched out.

"He's trouble."

Some part of her is aware that she needs to document this. Her phone doesn't have nearly the character of her instamatic, but it has higher resolution and each photo isn't nearly as expensive.

[old_monster]

"That is a death threat," Ye Baiyi says. "Something like that in my world would end in bloodshed and broken tables. Possibly exactly that happening to the one who made the threat."

[little_pieces_of_time]

Max's lips thin as she presses them together. She brings up her phone's camera app, and takes careful photos of the threatening photomanip, the threat written across her wall of photos, the insults written across her mirror for good measure, and the mess that had been made of her room.

"I don't want Nathan Prescott's head on a platter," she says, eventually, quiet, as she picks up the scattered quantum physics textbooks and sets them in a neat stack on the couch. "I don't want him dead- don't want anybody dead. But I don't want him hurting anybody else, either."

And the tiny time traveler is hesitant to say it's too late, even for him.

[old_monster]

"Dead is always an easy option to stop someone from hurting anyone else," Ye Baiyi points out. "And it's comparatively easy, if you have the martial arts for it. No complicated political manoeuvring."

[little_pieces_of_time]

"Easy in the short term, maybe, if you've the stomach for it, which I don't think I would," she shakes her head. The idea feels terrifying. "And then the cops - law enforcement - would get involved and wonder how the golden son of the town's richest and most influential family ended up dead."

Though with the rewind power she supposes it wouldn't be difficult to make it look like an accident.

"In the... in your martial arts... world," the word jianghu didn't catch in her memory, "you say it's pretty separate from the more mundane world. Who investigates when... someone's head turns up on a platter?"

[old_monster]

"If it was somebody who you could expect to defend themselves, then they would most likely have bitten off more than they could chew," Ye Baiyi says. "That said, all the many sects, agencies and alliances of course look out for their own, so if somebody turns up dead, you'd have their sect siblings trying to find out what happened, and get revenge if possible."

[little_pieces_of_time]

"You make it sound like the Wild West, but with swords instead of guns," she remarks.

Heh. Swords instead of horses, too.

"Lawless, apart from what people are strong enough to enforce themselves." She picks with a fingernail at the edge of the red marks on her wall. It should come off okay, but it'll have to be later. It'll just be annoying in the meantime.