“All this happening after ten years…Feels like a reset.”

“I don’t wanna be buried,” he sings. “In the pet cemetery…Don’t want to live my life again…” He bangs out three drumbeats on his toolbox with the palm of his hand before returning to his work. “The moon is full, the air is still, all of a sudden I feel a chill…”

This is a sci-fi original character whose goal is to make @atitanbound.bsky.social's life an absolute living nightmare, salt his crops, hide half his socks, run over his mailbox, and probably rip out his spine. Written by Sunder.

“A curse seems to be the most viable option. Now we just gotta figure out if it came from a witch, wizard, or some nameless old god and we’re set.”

“People don’t look at me—at this—and see some kind of savior, they see something they should fear. Maybe they’re right. In another life I would’ve been their worst nightmares made reality. Makes me sick to my stomach every time I think about that.”

“I’ve been. None of them have that…Feel. It’s so stupid I can’t even explain it.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” he said as he pinched the bridge of his nose. “But, y’know. I kinda love this place, too. Can’t really imagine living anywhere else.”

“I should’ve left. I should’ve put this city and everything and everyone in it in the rearview. I never had the guts. If I had, maybe I would’ve kept people close instead of losing them.”

“There’s something about her that seems so familiar. It’s like an image in the corner of my vision that disappears when I look at it.”

The acrid scent of oil was a comfort to him. Even as the breeze from the shop’s garage door carried in the sweetness of Autumn’s decay on the air, all Jack could smell was an engine pushed far past its breaking point by an idiot who thought “You only need an oil change once every two years.” —

Sometimes he would wake up in the pitch blackness of his home and reach out to feel someone who was no longer there, in a place that no longer existed, in a time that had passed so many years ago. Old habits and all that.

“H-O-T-T-O-G-O! You can take me hot to g—“ He shut the radio off. He wasn’t getting that stuck in his head again.

This caused the man to turn his head towards her as he raised a brow, his mouth twisting into something resembling a grimace. “You ask everyone questions like this, Columbo?”

Not unkindly, the man shot the teen a side-eyed look. He slipped the silver-white syringe into a zippered pocket of his pants, securing it away. “No. Medicine.”

The needle pierced his neck, a soft hissing from the auto-syringe whispering in his ear. Slowly he felt vigor returning to his limbs, not unlike a shot of adrenaline. However, he didn’t need the occasional shot of adrenaline to stay alive. “That shit stings every single time. Goddamn.”