Post by wblstudios on Apr 24, 2006 11:09:28 GMT -5
Godforsaken. Some people say it’s impossible to be godforsaken, for God doesn’t forsake anybody. It’s a comforting thought, that there’s an all-knowing, omnipotent being watching over us all, and that he loves us. A thought that, alone, gets some people by. But a thought not everybody can so easily accept.
Fade in on a setting all too fitting for a darker chapter in a darker character’s life... a slow pan across a graveyard in the middle of the night, where the spirits almost seem to make their presence heard against the backdrop of crickets. Ellis, knees drawn to her chest by pale and scarred arms, almost curses the crickets under her breath for interfering between her communion with the spirits of Philadelphia. Ones that could probably speak volumes of the history of America, the history of Hardcore, and a million and one personal stories. Stories told every night to the rare few that could listen.
Is this what you wanted, the living corpse girl thought grudgingly towards the one man who’d dominated her thoughts, much to her chagrin, ever since that night at Blast. The man who was always at arm’s length, but never actually attacked her since that night he’d made his intentions known. And his actions and words the last week, when she was forced to work alongside Josephine Miyazaki, only fueled the... intangible... inside of her. An intangible she could feel growing stronger every day, with each passing thought of death, every dream about a beautiful funeral, every five dollar word and million dollar smile from this man who’d just as much become her obsession as she had his. Ellis couldn’t put a finger on it, and given an opportunity, she probably wouldn’t want to.
She’d been forced to accept this darkness that lied inside her soul, a darkness she’d tried to block out ever since that first murderous thought welled up inside her shattered consciousness. But this intangible inside of her that kept dominating her soul, it felt like... it was as hard to describe as a rainbow to the blind. If forced to put it into words... and she’d probably have to, as she was expected to cut a promo before her match at Payback... she’d say it was like slow death. Like when one gains too high a state of consciousness, and can actually feel their cells dying constantly around them. A constant sensation of death and dying.
She felt no remorse for what she was going to put Jack of Blades through. But she almost felt bad for Tommy Havock, the literal third wheel. It was obvious what was going on... two newcomers, immersed in something neither could control, were becoming the talk of Philadelphia. The ‘suits’ at the WCF, seeing a pair of raging forces on a path to mutual assured destruction and headed by a crumbling “Team of Treachery”, found a way to shove one of their boys in the path of this pretty little hate machine. They went on bragging about how there was tension between Ellis and Havock, when she and the fans knew there was none. Havock, at the time, was just another victim of the ever-growing darkness sweeping the WCF.
When they realized that throwing Havock at Ellis like that wasn’t going to work, they decide to throw him at Jack, in the form of a horribly lopsided contendership match. Nobody expected Ace or JJ Biggs to walk out of there with that shot. So now what was supposed to be her glorious moment of revenge against this man who’d rather her dead in his arms than living at her own devices, was tainted by a title neither found important, and a man neither of them cared about. More smoke and mirrors in favor of Blades, who seemed all too content to joke at her from a distance, and in favor of Havock, who would have a stablemate at the helm of the WCF regardless of the outcome. Once again, Ellis was left out in the cold.
Cold and alone, she thought ruefully as she ended her attempt to communicate with the spirits and stood back up, not even bothering to brush off the dirt. It’s like a recurring theme.
The long, slow sojourn back to her car gave her all the more time to ruminate on the past month. While Outcast and Bobby Cairo were proving they were deserving of those top spots with every passing week, the internet buzz and the fan interest was solidly behind the newcomers thrust into the Television division. This gang of newcomers, led by Jack and Ellis, had been revitalizing the WCF, forcing the veterans to step up their game... a challenge most were gleefully fulfilling, which in turn, was good for business, and good for everyone.
But syndication, ratings, industry revitalization, those things meant nothing to the corpse girl, who at this point was truly beginning to feel as if she were the walking dead... trying to numb her emotions and push away all vestiges of pain. To throw away what little left she had of a soul and to simply follow her darker instincts, ones that were telling her to cut more with each passing night. Instincts that kept her boxcutter a permanent mainstay in the pocket of her Hitman jacket.
Those voices I heard in the fringes of my dreams, she thought to herself as she slid in without even bothering to buckle up before peeling off and hitting the road again. At once, I thought they were memories of my past, trying to claw free of my beautiful amnesia. But the memories had all but returned... the pain of her constant abuse, three years in manacles underneath the stairs of a New Jersey mansion, the forced exile from the world of the waking... of the living... and the voices still screamed at her in the fringes of her restless dreams. Sometimes in the split second between sleeping and awakening, she thought she could feel the icy cold hands of the abyss trying to drag her back home.
The faces cycled in the back of her mind as she unconsciously hit 90 miles per hour. Michael Ian Davis, the father who, for 14 years, always took time out of his busy schedule of running cocaine to batter the being he’d helped create. Ruby Woolf and her granddaughter J. Lynn Woolf, her first adoptive family, who after realizing they couldn’t take care of a girl with Ellis’ kind of needs, abandoned her in the middle of the Nevada desert, a place she would have met her blessed death in if it weren’t for an old kindly documentary filmmaker named Hal Johnson who just happened to be getting footage that day. Jacques and Helena Van Helsing, the quaint little couple who took her and a number of other lost children into their cabin only to complete a murder-suicide pact between the two of them a year later. Ivana Michael Cash, sister of a prominent businessman who’d taken a liking to the little girl, only to discard her when she no longer struck her fancy. All the homeless and drugged-out on the streets of New York while she was falling through the cracks in the system. And in the end, turning 18 just a couple of years ago and that same system telling her ‘to hell with you’.
So enraptured in a past she kept repeating every day in her head was the corpse girl, that she nearly missed the turnoff. Forcing herself to slow down, as she didn’t think she could handle dealing with the police again on top of everything else tonight, she made her way to the night’s main agenda. Philadelphia was, luckily for people like Ellis, rife with places open 24 hours. One such place, a combination Subway and gas station, loomed in front of Ellis as she parked and shut off the engine, hesitating to pull the key out of the ignition afterwards. Almost as if it meant staying here and making a commitment to meet this person.
The faces of her past still danced in the fringes of her consciousness, forcing her hand into her jacket, around her boxcutter, and across her forehead with slow, practiced strokes. Relishing every slash, every tinge of what used to be pain, the oozing of precious liquid down her face. She didn’t even bother to clean it off, letting it cake on as she stepped out of the car and towards the diner.
If whoever wanted to talk to her wanted to talk to her so badly, they could deal with it.
She did.
End Part One
---
~Ellis
Fade in on a setting all too fitting for a darker chapter in a darker character’s life... a slow pan across a graveyard in the middle of the night, where the spirits almost seem to make their presence heard against the backdrop of crickets. Ellis, knees drawn to her chest by pale and scarred arms, almost curses the crickets under her breath for interfering between her communion with the spirits of Philadelphia. Ones that could probably speak volumes of the history of America, the history of Hardcore, and a million and one personal stories. Stories told every night to the rare few that could listen.
Is this what you wanted, the living corpse girl thought grudgingly towards the one man who’d dominated her thoughts, much to her chagrin, ever since that night at Blast. The man who was always at arm’s length, but never actually attacked her since that night he’d made his intentions known. And his actions and words the last week, when she was forced to work alongside Josephine Miyazaki, only fueled the... intangible... inside of her. An intangible she could feel growing stronger every day, with each passing thought of death, every dream about a beautiful funeral, every five dollar word and million dollar smile from this man who’d just as much become her obsession as she had his. Ellis couldn’t put a finger on it, and given an opportunity, she probably wouldn’t want to.
She’d been forced to accept this darkness that lied inside her soul, a darkness she’d tried to block out ever since that first murderous thought welled up inside her shattered consciousness. But this intangible inside of her that kept dominating her soul, it felt like... it was as hard to describe as a rainbow to the blind. If forced to put it into words... and she’d probably have to, as she was expected to cut a promo before her match at Payback... she’d say it was like slow death. Like when one gains too high a state of consciousness, and can actually feel their cells dying constantly around them. A constant sensation of death and dying.
She felt no remorse for what she was going to put Jack of Blades through. But she almost felt bad for Tommy Havock, the literal third wheel. It was obvious what was going on... two newcomers, immersed in something neither could control, were becoming the talk of Philadelphia. The ‘suits’ at the WCF, seeing a pair of raging forces on a path to mutual assured destruction and headed by a crumbling “Team of Treachery”, found a way to shove one of their boys in the path of this pretty little hate machine. They went on bragging about how there was tension between Ellis and Havock, when she and the fans knew there was none. Havock, at the time, was just another victim of the ever-growing darkness sweeping the WCF.
When they realized that throwing Havock at Ellis like that wasn’t going to work, they decide to throw him at Jack, in the form of a horribly lopsided contendership match. Nobody expected Ace or JJ Biggs to walk out of there with that shot. So now what was supposed to be her glorious moment of revenge against this man who’d rather her dead in his arms than living at her own devices, was tainted by a title neither found important, and a man neither of them cared about. More smoke and mirrors in favor of Blades, who seemed all too content to joke at her from a distance, and in favor of Havock, who would have a stablemate at the helm of the WCF regardless of the outcome. Once again, Ellis was left out in the cold.
Cold and alone, she thought ruefully as she ended her attempt to communicate with the spirits and stood back up, not even bothering to brush off the dirt. It’s like a recurring theme.
The long, slow sojourn back to her car gave her all the more time to ruminate on the past month. While Outcast and Bobby Cairo were proving they were deserving of those top spots with every passing week, the internet buzz and the fan interest was solidly behind the newcomers thrust into the Television division. This gang of newcomers, led by Jack and Ellis, had been revitalizing the WCF, forcing the veterans to step up their game... a challenge most were gleefully fulfilling, which in turn, was good for business, and good for everyone.
But syndication, ratings, industry revitalization, those things meant nothing to the corpse girl, who at this point was truly beginning to feel as if she were the walking dead... trying to numb her emotions and push away all vestiges of pain. To throw away what little left she had of a soul and to simply follow her darker instincts, ones that were telling her to cut more with each passing night. Instincts that kept her boxcutter a permanent mainstay in the pocket of her Hitman jacket.
Those voices I heard in the fringes of my dreams, she thought to herself as she slid in without even bothering to buckle up before peeling off and hitting the road again. At once, I thought they were memories of my past, trying to claw free of my beautiful amnesia. But the memories had all but returned... the pain of her constant abuse, three years in manacles underneath the stairs of a New Jersey mansion, the forced exile from the world of the waking... of the living... and the voices still screamed at her in the fringes of her restless dreams. Sometimes in the split second between sleeping and awakening, she thought she could feel the icy cold hands of the abyss trying to drag her back home.
The faces cycled in the back of her mind as she unconsciously hit 90 miles per hour. Michael Ian Davis, the father who, for 14 years, always took time out of his busy schedule of running cocaine to batter the being he’d helped create. Ruby Woolf and her granddaughter J. Lynn Woolf, her first adoptive family, who after realizing they couldn’t take care of a girl with Ellis’ kind of needs, abandoned her in the middle of the Nevada desert, a place she would have met her blessed death in if it weren’t for an old kindly documentary filmmaker named Hal Johnson who just happened to be getting footage that day. Jacques and Helena Van Helsing, the quaint little couple who took her and a number of other lost children into their cabin only to complete a murder-suicide pact between the two of them a year later. Ivana Michael Cash, sister of a prominent businessman who’d taken a liking to the little girl, only to discard her when she no longer struck her fancy. All the homeless and drugged-out on the streets of New York while she was falling through the cracks in the system. And in the end, turning 18 just a couple of years ago and that same system telling her ‘to hell with you’.
So enraptured in a past she kept repeating every day in her head was the corpse girl, that she nearly missed the turnoff. Forcing herself to slow down, as she didn’t think she could handle dealing with the police again on top of everything else tonight, she made her way to the night’s main agenda. Philadelphia was, luckily for people like Ellis, rife with places open 24 hours. One such place, a combination Subway and gas station, loomed in front of Ellis as she parked and shut off the engine, hesitating to pull the key out of the ignition afterwards. Almost as if it meant staying here and making a commitment to meet this person.
The faces of her past still danced in the fringes of her consciousness, forcing her hand into her jacket, around her boxcutter, and across her forehead with slow, practiced strokes. Relishing every slash, every tinge of what used to be pain, the oozing of precious liquid down her face. She didn’t even bother to clean it off, letting it cake on as she stepped out of the car and towards the diner.
If whoever wanted to talk to her wanted to talk to her so badly, they could deal with it.
She did.
End Part One
---
~Ellis
