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]

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[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.