pulvisnumbra - Tumblr blog

[pulvisnumbra]

NAME: Unknown; goes by J. Doe/J.D. AGE: Exact age unknown; mid to late 30s GENDER & PRONOUNS: gendervoid, any pronouns SKILLS: medical knowledge, scavenging, tracking, physical combat, knife proficiency, jawline that could cut thru glass INTRO: { cw: needles, radiation poisoning/sickness, injury, vomit, death }

the first time they wake up, they’re in a hospital, strapped to a gurney with what feels like the worst hangover of their life, which doesn’t mean a whole lot because they can’t remember any other hangover, or any other part of their life. someone, a doctor, but not a medical doctor, they think, tells them they were brought into the emergency room dead, but they were revived. she asks them for their name, and they don’t have an answer. so their file and the bracelet on their wrist says j. doe on it, and that’s that. she asks them if they know what city they’re in, or where they’re from, and they don’t have an answer for either of those questions, either, so their file has a question mark where birthplace should be. their body, they learn, was found in the charles river. they don’t get far enough to ask how long they were dead before you hear sirens go off, and chaos starts, all of the doctors conveniently forgetting about the doe strapped to the gurney in the corner of the e.r. with a barrage of new patients being brought in. it takes them nearly knocking their gurney over to get anyone’s attention, but even then no one tells them what’s going on, they get a needle pressed into their arm and an artificial sleep, sirens and shouting sending them off.

the second time they wake up, they’re in the charles river again, and it’s snowing. everything smells like death, and ozone, and there’s a distinctive metallic taste on their tongue. the plastic hospital bracelet is melted to their skin, skin which is sickly pale, looks as sick as they feel, and they’ve still got the bracers that had strapped them to the gurney dangling from their forearms, ragged. they still don’t remember their name, or where they’re from, or anything else for that matter. in fact, they have no idea how they got from the hospital to the river, but they realize quickly that’s the least of their worries, because they realize, as they slowly climb out of the river, onto the street, it’s not snow, it’s ash.

it only takes a few minutes wandering the streets to realize what happened, and that they need to get the fuck out of the city asap unless they want to end up dead, or fucked up by whatever nuclear disaster rained down on the world. it only takes a few more minutes for them to realize they already are fucked up by the fallout, although maybe not as badly as they might have been somehow. the nausea isn’t hangover bad this time, it’s something worse, makes them lose their empty stomach on the side of the strangely empty street. and there’s a pull in the back of their mind telling them before they run they need to rob. there must still be some memories there in their subconscious because they know they need potassium iodide, diethylenetriamine pentaacetic acid, Prussian blue, and new clothes immediately. and they end up finding that along with the innate medical knowhow, they’re also not so bad at theft, fighting, or hotwiring a car, either.

they make it out of the city with plenty of supplies, but they’re well aware they’ll only have use of the mercedes they managed to steal for so long, just like not even that medicine is going to stop things they can’t see at first from happening to their body considering how unprotected they apparently were when whatever happened happened. they end up finding a settlement of what were clearly doomsday preppers further out in the boonies, underground, and the medical knowhow they don’t know how they have is enough to get them in with the idiots because one of them is sick, horrifically sick. so they can rest safely, figure out what the damage done really is, even though they isolate them to a closet for decontamination at first even though they know they will never be fully decontaminated, given the way it seems every bit of color is slowly being sapped from their body, skin, hair, eyes, all of it. once they’re deemed safe, incorrectly so for a number of reasons, they start planning, all while playing the docile pseudo doctor to these lunatics. they plan how to kill them off one by one, take all of the supplies they can stand to move––enough gasoline keep to keep their car moving for a long time––and set off again, get further from the blast zone, and away from idiots, seek out a better settlement, if possible.

it doesn’t go quiet as planned, and they’re pretty sure it’s because they weren’t as much of a criminal mastermind in their life before as the ease of stealing and hotwiring had made them believe. they all end up dead as planned, yeah, but their car also gets set on fire in the process, most of the supplies torched as well, the assholes rather no one be able to use them if they can’t apparently. they manage to scrap together enough to keep them going for a while, but it makes moving on even more dire than they had thought, nothing but a camping backpack full of some canned food, a first aid kit, what’s left of their radiation poisoning pills, a couple of hunting knives, and a machete they’re not even sure they have the skills to use.

they’re on their own after that, which they find they don’t really mind at all. every once in a while, they’ll end up in a settlement for a bit, find ways to trade, their medical knowledge more than enough usually to get others to give them food, and shelter for a while, but they never stay, something off putting to them about being stuck in a group of people they don’t know, can’t trust. there’s a very slight urge to try to figure out what their life was before, but it quiets the more time passes, the more the radiation sickness seems to sink in, making them feel less and less human over time. something is different about this radiation, but they don’t know enough to figure out why, and the other survivors they meet don’t seem to know much more, either, even if they fill in the blanks of what happened. whatever it is that’s different, though, doesn’t necessarily seem to be killing them quickly, but changing them, and they haven’t figured out what they’re supposed to do about that. it feels like they’ve already died twice, anyway, already been resurrected twice, it feels like a waste to let it happen a third time.

[pulvisnumbra]

The Witcher | 1.03 — Betrayer Moon

[pulvisnumbra]

test

TEST test test test.