Please note that this is a work of fiction for my Detritus RPG that I am currently developing. Feel free to comment on it, what you like and what you don’t. It will all help the end product of the game.
The worst thing about coming here is the first time you wake up. Like, I have had moments of disorientation before, bad acid and the like but when you actually do wake up in another world it is like nothing that you could ever achieve with a needle.
I remember it like yesterday. I was in my flophouse with all the others. I had scored from Vinney that night. Heroin. The amber eyed girl slipped into me and took the edge off. I needed it that night. The water had been cut off several weeks before and the stench of the others around me was intense. I always got down to the halfway houses to bathe at least once every few days. but those other sunken eyed losers just did not care. Nine times out of ten they would wake up in their own faeces and not think twice about it.
Vinney really knew me. Best dealer I’d ever met as he’d take money or a favour, sexual like, for a hit. He was kind of handsome. Fat, but striking you know. And he always had a nice word or two for me. Saved the good stuff for me he said. Each hit came wrapped with a clean syringe. Not many dealers do that now do they.
I lay in the empty bathtub and I could feel the girl running through my veins. She was a warm hand along my skin stopping just before my neck. I remember the first time she took me all the way but I never had a hit again like it. I was just about gone, my eyes heavy when the door slammed open. I turned my head but it was like I was immersed in treacle and I could only move it so far without that dizzy feeling.
I don’t think I had to move far before some guy stepped into view. He was not from the street. Crisp white shirt (apart from the arterial spray that stained it) and business pants. Couldn’t see the blood on them as they were black. he was yelling at me but it was like I had my head under water and I couldn’t quite catch what he was saying. Vinney’s head was hanging from his clenched fist by his long curly brown locks. His eyes looked like they were bulging somehow. And I could see a bit of his spine sticking out of the torn skin of his neck. It looked like an obscene dogs tail and I think I giggled a little.
I am not sure what happened next. All I know was I blinked. Maybe for a long time. When I opened my eyes again Vinney’s head was laying on my breast. It looked like he had laid down on me like he sometimes did and fell to sleep. Except this time his eyes were bulging. I think his left eye was even pressed against my skin. I threw his head over the lip in the tub. I remember clearly thinking that when I woke tomorrow Vinney and I would have a laugh about this.
And that was the last time I saw Aukland.
When I woke I felt things sticking into me. I was naked, I always trip naked, clothes make me feel trapped. I grabbed something and pulled it up to my face and opened my eyes. It was one of those old irons that they used to sit in the coals of fire. Back when there was no electricity.
I realised I was outside too and the sky was funny. It was like grey with lurid green and yellow lines that seemed to shift. Like detergent on water under bright light? Maybe an oil spill or something. But there seemed light a plenty and I realised that I must still be in the trip. Next thing that happened seemed to prove it.
A whole heap of bugs swarmed up from the piles of junk (cassette tapes, crt monitors, old style coke cans) and they headed to what seemed to be some kind of woven material. i’d not seen its like and when I had been a model I had worn a lot of stuff you know. Well they kept piling together. Cockroaches, crickets, ants, spiders, dragonflies. Seemingly every damn critter you could ever think of until it looked like a damn man in a cloak stood before me.
It said to me something in a different language but I heard it in my own right inside my brain. It made me want to vomit.
“Forgotten.” All it damn well said.
Slowly it moved at me. All the bugs moving at once like it was a guy striding but the air was filled with buzzing and scraping as it moved. The body bent and grabbed the iron that I had thrown away. It raised it in its hands above my head as if it were going to slam it down and kill me. I laughed. I had never had a trip like this before and it was close to the best ever. I looked down at where Vinney’s head had been last night and saw his brown, almost black congealed blood all over my pock marked belly. This seemed to worry me. Was I tripping something asked.
Then I looked up and as the thing bought the iron down I saw some kind of liquid seem to ooze from between the bugs. They seemed to struggle to continue holding one another and they slipped and fell apart. They showered on me and the iron crashed into my upraised arm. The pain spread like fire as I saw it splinter the bone in my forearm. Like literally saw it because the bone stuck straight out of my skin stained with my blood. The insects scrambled all over my body but they could not get a hold. They seemed covered in oil, or some kind of slippery grease.
And then I saw like two small creepy dolls motioning me to them. I stood and felt a lot of the bugs crush under my heels. I tried to run but fell cracking my head on an old fashioned meat safe like my Grandma once showed me. Blood in my eyes, my arm a shattered wreck, my feet covered in insect entrails and grease I ran to those two little creatures like my life depended on it.
Of course now I know my life did depend on it. That insect creature, a Jugo looking for a meal. Apparently they aren’t all like that, but they all do have an attitude I can tell you. The two creepy dolls were Lost. Or that is what they call themselves and here I am not known as Human, rather than Forgotten. They wept for me those two little Lost made up of all their doll parts. They took me into a secret place and they healed me up as best they could. I told them how I felt like I was back in the shoot I did modelled on Pandora’s box. Now they all call me Pandora. I like it, and I like them, but I am still uncertain of this place.
They tell me the Jugo are easily enough dealt with “a bit of magic” that they will teach me. It is the Consumers and their constructs I really have to worry about. Apparently once I am over the withdrawals (which they have a great drink for) that I will help them find the Erudite whatever that is.
It has been weeks and the arm has a bend to it and aches when it is cold. I am still not a hundred percent sure that I won’t wake up soon and find it was all just a marvellous trip. I’ll tell Vinney about it and he will laugh. I will of course get him to call me by my new name now. i have been about these two for ages and I can barely remember my own. Hi, I am Pandora! I am the lady forgotten from Detritus. May I have a hit please?