thegreatexperiment: (Pissed)
Waking up with a headache and the enormous urge to ralph was not something new for Sam. Arizona was a party school and she tried to attend as many as she could. But as she struggled to open her eyes--each eyelid felt like it was glued shut--she started to remember. She hadn't been at a party. She'd been...where?

It came back to her in bits and pieces, like the images between flashes of a strobe light, each one progressing, but a stillframe all the same. An art exhibition. Most of it not to her taste. Bronze sculptures of nudes. Mostly old men. Paper-machete icons of toilets and dishwashers. The kind of art that was trying so hard to be edgy that it was stupid. Meaningless. She'd decided to leave early, to head back to campus. The bus stop was deserted. And then suddenly...suddenly there was an arm around her chest. And a hand clutching a wet cloth over her mouth and nose.

Chloroform!

Sam's eyes popped open, which was a mistake immediately. Dazzling overhead lights glared down at her, momentarily blinding her and sending a shooting pain to the base of her skull and her temples. She felt sick all over again and wanted to throw up, but there was nothing but bile churning in her stomach. A few dry heaves and the pain began to lessen to an aching throb. Greedily, she sucked in the air-conditioned air. It felt good. Soothing. And it helped clear her senses.

She started to become... )
thegreatexperiment: (Pissed)
"I don't know, I thought it was a little too Avant-garde." Sam had only recently learned the term and she always felt incredibly proud of herself when she was able to use it. Especially around Uncle Tom and his girlfriend Tina. They were just so...cool.

Tom chuckled, his breath coming out in foggy clouds that drifted up into the starry sky. "You think so, kiddo?" He turned to look at Tina, wrapping his arm around her waist. "How about you?"

"Well," she said, "I'd certainly be interested to know the motive behind using nothing but stringed instruments for the entire second act. Maybe they were trying to convey the mother's longing for simplicity?"

The rock opera had been Sam's birthday present. Her parents had offered to throw her a big, blow-out sweet sixteen, but that hadn't been of much interest. She didn't have a lot of friends and, anyway, she was probably going to be graduating early and heading off to college. No point in wasting time or money on the elitist high school snobs she had to see day after day after day. She was much happier just hanging with Tom and Tina. She wanted to be part of their world, to speak their language, to use terms like 'Avant-garde' and be taken absolutely seriously. It was the perfect birthday. Not that Sam had much of a basis for comparison.

It was freezing... )
thegreatexperiment: (Pissed)
From the outside, the Kindred Shopping District looked like a warehouse. It was as if someone had cast some kind of Harry Potter spell over the place. It said, ‘Nothing interesting to see. Move it along.’ Which, of course, was the point. On the inside, the KSD was more like a mall, with a gigantic courtyard in the middle, open to the sky. The shops catered to the needs of the more supernatural residents of Los Angeles. Sam’s favorite was Crazy Ivan’s Magic Emporium. It was the most cluttered thrift shop she’d ever seen, filled with miscellaneous items that were supposedly enchanted. She’d once considered purchasing a paint brush there. But then she remembered every movie she’d ever seen and thought better of it.

The KSD was neutral territory, where any vampire, regardless of covenant or clan, could hang out. It was also, at the moment, a hub of activity around the newest bit of legislation working its way through the Kindred world: Dropping the Masquerade. The most vocal opponents and proponents of the idea congregated, giving long-winded speeches, preaching mostly to their respective choirs. Sam herself had accidentally raised a bit of hell a month ago, just having a lively discussion with some of her friends. Neutral territory or not, you had to be careful what you said. There were always people listening, waiting for the chance to form a good, old-fashioned mob of one kind or another.

Anyway, Sam wasn’t here to talk… )
thegreatexperiment: (Pissed)
Sam was fast. She’d been fast even before she died. High school track team. Only for a hot minute, it seemed, but it had stuck with her. And it served her well, now, as she raced through the jumbled and ripped up streets of Los Angeles, jumping over steaming craters in the concrete, dodging around debris that was so twisted and mangled that she couldn’t even begin to guess what any of it had originally been. Was that bent metal rod a piece of the international space station? A support beam from a skyscraper? A fender? No way to know, no time to care.

She raced along Vine, her wig tilted to a terrible angle, her clothing ripped and torn. Her shadow stretched out in front of her, illuminated by fires from every direction. No matter which way she turned, she couldn’t erase the image of Sterling Engelhart being sucked down into the earth. “He had a piece of me with him,” Elizabeth kept moaning to Aubrey, before she succumbed to torpor and the hunters opened fire. If Sam believed in miracles, she’d call it one that no one had been shot. She’d separated from Grace and Avery at the Ordo library, then immediately turned tail and started back for home, despite their protestations that she should stay with them.

Even in this state... )
thegreatexperiment: (Pissed)
“I didn’t realize being dead came with homework.”

Snark was always Sam’s first, best line of defense, especially when things got too real or confusing. Although she had to admit, she wasn’t sure which this was. When Karen summoned her into her study and sat her down at the desk, she’d been expecting another lesson in mind control. She hadn’t anticipated Karen setting a spiral-bound notebook and a number two pencil on top of the desk in front of her. That definitely fell outside of the new norm.

The last month and a half had been trying, to say the least. What with the dying and the coming back as a vampire and the dropping out of college. It didn’t help that Karen seemed more like a vice principal than a vampire. She wore her hair severely short, cropped close to her head. And every night, she was in the same hideous suit, a dull, gray blazer with a dull, gray pencil skirt. The only thing that changed was the blouse underneath and that was always in some shade of black or white or gray too. It was like Karen had stepped out of a black and white TV and had yet to notice that the world was now live, in living color.

She stood on the opposite side… )
thegreatexperiment: (Pissed)
Sometimes, Sam wondered if she had undiagnosed ADHD. She had no patience for all the talk talk talk. The only thing that convinced her that there wasn't anything wrong with her was the dull understanding that there was something wrong with pretty much every Kindred. It wasn't her. It was them. Case in point, standing around the Kindred Shopping District, listening to Jericho wank about political structure and praxis and blah, blah, blah. Sam had tuned him out about five minutes ago, to the point where he pretty much just sounded like the adults in a Charlie Brown cartoon. Avery and Grace and the others were listening. They'd know the right way to react to things. Sam was more interested in examining the rubble, anyway.

Some of the shops had survived the Rain better than others. Crazy Ivan's was basically a giant hole in the ground, but a few still had standing walls and shelves with items left. Items not important enough to salvage. Sam was just starting to pick her way over to the smoothie shop where she used to meet up with Tommy when she felt an odd pressure on her pocket. Instinct kicked in and she reached for her revolver, ready to make her would-be pickpocket piss his or her pants. At the same time, though, she reached for her pocket and found no hand to grab.

Nothing was missing... )
thegreatexperiment: (Pissed)
Thank fuck that was over. Going to the Ventrue clan meeting—which could just as easily have been called the Old White Guys in Suits Convention—had been a huge mistake. The ones that didn’t look at Sam with open disgust had stared at her like some kind of carnival sideshow freak. Was it justified? Maybe. Was it polite? No. Did it make it abundantly clear that she didn’t belong? Hell yes. She shouldn’t have gone at all. It was only that Daniel Jericho, who as a Ventrue and a Carthian had taken it upon himself to show her the ropes, insisted. How could she say no? Karen stressed to her the importance of making friends. So she’d tried to make friends.

And by and large, she’d failed.

After the meeting was adjourned (did anyone actually still use that word?) there was the expected lingering. The other members of her clan chit-chatted like old friends. Some of them, she suspected, had probably known each other for hundreds of years. If not more. And that was a delightful, fresh reminder of how very, very out-of-place she was. There were no other…what was the word Jericho had used? Neonates. She was probably the only person there still within the span of her mortal life.

As she lingered near the back of the room... )
thegreatexperiment: (Pissed)
She missed airplanes. Not for the flying part, because Sam had always been a little bit of a white-knuckle traveler, but the convenience part. Just another item on the list. Airplanes and Face Time and food that could be bought and paid for. It was a three-night road trip with Karen for her, complete with awkward silence and even more awkward pit stops that left more than one gas station attendant feeling anemic and confused. Until very recently, Karen had spared Sam the discomfort of having to cover up her own tracks with Dominate. But things had to start changing. That was the rule. If Sam wanted to be emancipated, she had to fend for herself.

This last week together? It was Karen's parting gift.

They arrived in Lake Forest somewhere close to one in the morning. Sam hadn't been allowed to tell her parents that they were coming. Something to do with Karen only being able to manipulate fifteen minutes of memory. She cringed a little bit at the idea of showing up unannounced. But then she thought about how excited her parents would be to see her.

Then she cringed more.

As Karen turned onto Sam's old street... )
thegreatexperiment: (Pissed)
There were nights when Sam's life felt like life and there were nights when it felt like a movie. And not just any movie, but a really, really shitty movie. Way worse than a B-movie. Even Bruce Campbell wouldn't touch that shit. The sort of movie where you saw the puppet's strings, the zippers on the backs of the rubber suits. Things were just falling apart, like the facade of reality had been splashed with turpentine.

Obviously, it was going to be one of those nights.

They had a plan. It wasn't a good one, to Sam's mind. The idea of Avery volunteering himself as bait left a bad taste in her mouth, but she supposed, if she was trying to be objective, he was their best bet. He hadn't just mastered the Coil of Rhea. He'd friggin' invented. Well. No. That wasn't the right word, exactly. More like...he'd discovered it?

In the way that Columbus had 'discovered' America... )
thegreatexperiment: (Pissed)
When she came out of the shower, wrapped up in a towel, but still feeling dirty, there was no one in the hotel room. She was sure that there had been at least five or six other people, when she'd first woken up, but now they were all gone. So were her clothes. And her wig and her cellphone. It all felt a little too vivid and surreal at the same time, so she retreated back into the bathroom, sitting on the ledge of the tub and staring at the fogged up mirror. Slowly, the condensation cooled, long drips of water running down the glass, leaving behind silver streaks in which she could see her reflection.

Was she supposed to be able to do that? She ran her fingers over her forehead, where it had been split open after hitting the corner of the table. Her skin was smooth and whole, no trace of a scar. She probed her neck and her shoulders. It all felt the same. It all felt like her. But her water-warmed skin was cooling and that was a little frightening. More than a little. The more the cold crept into her flesh, the more she began to remember about the night before.

The art show... )
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