Beautiful Day (OPEN)

((OOC: Tis cool, I didn't exactly give you much to work with. Teaches me to post when half-dead.))

Orion felt someone slip his headphones off him. He wasn't too concerned about it; as they hadn't ripped them off of him, they weren't your average delinquent thug that he had to deal with. Tilting his head to shift one eye away from his book to the intrusion, he calmly studied the person next to him who had his headphones in her hands. A short girl with brown hair, she was was wearing average clothing, aside from the lab coat. Orion would have instantly been hostile, if he hadn't noticed that the coat was brown, not white.

Valor wore white coats, not brown. Except at the end there, then they all wore red coats...

Orion blinked once, expression and posture not changing as he stared up at the seated person from his position lying on the roof. Her eyes had drifted down to meet his own, and then she spoke about her apparent lord and savior. Orion casually tuned her out about halfway through her sentence, slowly drifting his gaze back to his book as he turned a page. When she finished talking, Orion spoke up, calmly and softly, though loud enough to be heard.

"That depends miss. Is your lord able to help me cope with memories of another life? Another life where the rules no longer existed, the streets stained red and black from constant warfare and killing, the world no longer under a sense of order? Where gods walked among men and survival was now the new rule of law along with necessity, as a madman triggered the apocalypse and bathed the entire world in nuclear hell? Is your lord able to wash away the blood stains upon my hands from those I killed for no reason beyond that they irritated me at the time?"

Orion paused in his monologue, pondered a moment.

"Well, that, and they were also planning on killing me, for some odd reason. Seriously, a man with blue hair, golden eyes, and a big-ass halberd of fuck you, clearly stained with blood? That was such a great idea. Idiots, what the hell did they think those were, ketchup stains? Darwin isn't just for animals. And then there were those lackeys of that Barker jackass... Still, everyone dies when you slam an axe blade halfway through their skull."

Orion blinked again as he dragged himself out of his memories. He tilted his head again to direct his gaze back at the young woman.

"Aaaah... Sorry about that miss. Sometimes I get lost in the past and ramble on and on. You were saying something about your lord and savior?"

Orion was damn well aware of what she was trying to do. No sane missionary would go recruit someone from a rooftop, let alone a rooftop belonging to UoF. Point of fact, missionaries rarely ever approached those of 552, for obvious reasons. Thus, she was trying to get him to leave, though at least she was polite being about it.

Still, this was a verbal challenge of who can offend who. Orion had a bet that he'd probably be better.

As Orion finished, there was a moment while the girl next to him shifted into a more comfortable position. Then she called him depressing and a riot at parties. Orion snorted in laughter, closing his book to maintain most of his attention on the woman sitting next to him. He didn't bother to get up though; he was perfectly comfortable lying on the roof, and his backpack was actually surprisingly comfy for what it was.

"Depressing? No no no no. I'm just speaking of the shit I've seen. I'm talking legit everyone man for himself Fallout style survival." He paused for a moment. "With less guns. Everyone there just despised the damn things, much like the delinquents here. Probably cause the people who survived the apocalypse were members of schools like 552 and 259."

Memories flashed in front of his eyes before he shook his head rapidly to clear them.

"The worst part? The worst fucking part though? Because some jackass twisted my DNA like a kitten with a ball of yarn, I was rendered totally immune to alcohol. Which means I couldn't even get buzzed, let alone drunk! Do you know how much that sucked? Man, I would've killed for a good drink to wash away the circumstances of that shithole every once and a while!"

Orion paused again.

"Well, actually, I did kill a couple of people for a good drink. But they went for their knives first."

Orion shrugged. A. It wasn't illegal at the time and B. You can't really be arrested for doing shit in an alternate dimension.

"As for parties... Nah, parties were good. I was a freaking master of procurement. I got people drinks, I got people vehicles, man I even got fireworks! Lit up the night sky!"

Another memory washed over him, this one he didn't push away.

"... Oh and also dousing a park in metric fucktons of gasoline. Like, the entire park. Then I lit it up, white man's bonfire style. Because people were so boring, and I said 'why the hell not'? I then stole a police car to go drinking afterwards. Good times. Gooood times."

Orion nodded to himself. Those were good times. Him, a friend of his that he messed with who he got to join him on his bar run. Who he probably also terrified for all of the driving laws he broke. Along with the fact that he couldn't drive legally, he had a fake license that time. He had learned here, and had gotten a real license, because he figured it might come in handy. He made a mental note to himself to look up how to hotwire cars, that will more than likely come in handy as well... And start researching how to pull things like that off again, because that was fun as hell.

"So, what about you? Any fun stories of this world? Cause sadly since I ended up here I've been more preoccupied with keeping my head down, government overwatch was new... Didn't have that back then."

Orion was aware of her touching his hair, but paid it no mind. His hair was weird: a dark unnatural blue, yet it was natural, as he never used dye. Plus, he was aware of how natural it is was every damn morning he changed clothes. It wasn't surprising that people would mess with it. The young lady introduced herself as Ira, and then spun a story of her own. Orion listened carefully to her story, saying nothing. Once she had finished, he carefully stowed away his book his in bag without looking, then ruffled around in it for a pair of glass bottles he took out. Specifically, they were coke bottles, unopened. He offered one to her, and if she didn't take it he would simply set it down next to him and her before opening his own. He took a swig from it, face remaining neutral, before holding it to his side, the one she wasn't on.

"And you call me depressing." Orion's voice had softened, though, despite the somewhat harsh nature of his words, and he refrained from looking at her. The nature of the story, and the glimpse of composed neutrality he saw on her face, signified to him that it wasn't just a story to her. "Name's Orion. At least, it is now. It wasn't the name I was born with, but it's the name I'm stuck with."

He took another swig of his coke, and thoughtfully shook it a tiny bit, watching the liquid.

"Suppose it's my turn again. There once was a young man who wanted to help people, protect them. He fought for them, he bled for them, his body was battered and broken for them. But in the end... nothing changed. People still hurt people, and all he did was delaying the inevitable. Then things changed.

"His school was taken command of by a PMC on the payroll of the government. Now, violence was met with oppressive violence, and those who stepped out of line were hauled off into a jail built upon the school itself. Nothing was heard from those who disappeared for quite some time. Then, the leader of the PMC revolted, plunging the school into chaos. The young man was lost on what to do, until he found out his mentor's love was kidnapped by a twisted psycho and dragged into the depths of the jail. He followed his mentor, along with a few others, to track the madman down. They all confronted him, and the young man realized how weak he was. Despite getting lucky and half-blinding their opponent, the only reason he was able to do so was because of how easily he was knocked aside from the start, how he was disregarded so quickly. He watched as his mentor gave in to his rage, and with lightning enshrouding him he tore the madman apart and dropped the ceiling on him to kill him for hurting his beloved.

"The young man was shaken by just how insignificant he was. Then he was offered a chance by an acquaintance of his, a very strong one. A chance that may result in his becoming stronger. The young man, lost as he was, quickly accepted. However, it was a lie. He received no strength, he received no power to help him. He was rendered desensitized to the world, to pain. Though he was enshrouded in a soft glow forever after, all it did was broadcast his rage and despair upon the darkened world.

"He traveled away, away from the memories, to a different place. Arriving at a different school, he settled in, playing pranks, disrupting life, and eventually sided with another group trying to improve the circumstances. It was all for naught, however. A genius, a man with power, a man obsessed with control, experimented upon a number of the young man's fellow students, turning their hair unanimously into white, gifting them with unreal powers over fire, ice, lightning, and a variety of other powers, not to mention the monstrosities he brought about. The strongest members of the school confronted him, and his response was to burn the world with nuclear fire.

"There was no society left. People banded into the factions they had formed for the school, now brought about for survival and territory. The young man wanted no part of it, however, and walked away from it all, turning himself into a wanderer that would only interfere if it meant harming the man who doomed the world, and nothing else would would sway him to any side. He was targeted, however, by the normal folk, those who had watched the students, because of his unnatural appearance, and so he was forced to cut them down, time and time again. He made a few new friends, was generally well received by a few factions, but in general he was alone, forced away from most of society because of how he was.

"The young man was fed up. There was no innate goodness, there was no helping his fellow man. When it boiled down to survival, everyone was at the end of the day concerned for themselves. He thought long and hard, and wondered why he had tried to defend them. So he didn't anymore. He did as he pleased, avoiding those with power, collecting odds and ends and tinkering with whatever he could find, and shut people out. He locked himself away, simply living as he felt like it, and no one stopped him.

"Then one day, he woke up. The young man was confused, disoriented. What he went through, was it real, was it a hallucination, or was he hallucinating now? What was true, and what was not? Out of fear, he ran again, and closed himself off, treating everything as true with the knowledge that it may prove false once more, that he might wake up again."

Orion took a breath, a little shaky, and then took another swig from his bottle.

"He ponders every day, if he cannot avoid it, of what is the nature of himself, of his surrounding, of the reality he lives in. Is there one, and he dreams on one side or another? Is there multiple, and he is forced to wander from place to place, never stopping, never making home? Or is he someone forever dreaming, for there is nothing else but dreams?"

Orion looked through the glass of the bottle, staring at what was on the other side, distorted by the glass.

"I wonder what is worse. Being cut off from everything and anything, lost with no sense of direction? Or having a direction that only results in failure, no matter how many times you change direction, how many times you attempt to connect?"

Orion couldn't help it. He closed his eyes and just started laughing. It wasn't fake laughter; he was genuinely laughing at the shounen anime comment Ira made. He was only barely able to hear her opinion on his question. When he finally stopped laughing, he chose to answer the first comment.

"To be entirely fair, he looks like one, don't you think?" Orion gestured to himself. Golden eyes, blue hair? Yeah, that was normal.

"I tried having a sense of direction. Didn't work. Figure I might as well try aimless wandering. No real goals aside from accumulating knowledge and prepping for the future, regardless of the factions being formed or the people around me." Orion grabbed the second bottle he had left next to him, since Ira had stolen his, and opened it, drinking from it.

"What about you? What drives you? I'm fairly sure I've heard your name once or twice among the rumors, aren't you a member of the Lightning Gang?"