KILLER WOLF'S PROFILE

This is something I probably should have clarified before officially signing up... I'm using a 2d maker (Rm2k3), but right now my brain is locked into fake first person perspective mode.

I've started sketching out ideas for my dungeon, but it occurred to me that with my method, maps tend to feel much bigger than they actually are. A well fleshed out 20x15 map can feel absolutely cavernous with my system.

If my point of view plan is going to be a problem, let me know, and I can map up something else as an also-ran.

It could be a simple copy-paste duplication for the Oblivion swords. I've used alternate weapon swapping in the past. You have to watch out for left and right handiness. When you put the weapons back on, they might not be in the right order, but that sounds like a separate issue.

My sleep deprivation has me just two clicks up the dial from zombie right now, but I can have a look at things sometime tomorrow, if nobody has figured it out by then.

Puffy sleeves, southwestern style.

Thanks! I'm working on getting all the known bugs/issues corrected ,as well as tightening a couple of things up, so I have a good foundation for the rest of the content.

Candice, better known as Candy to her friends and the group of guys who, less then altruistically, concerned themselves with her every move, took another drag on the spliff and lazily adjusted the drape of her oversized sweater. She would have been a pretty girl, in fact she still was in many ways, but she looked tired and drawn out. It wasn’t just the spliff talking.

Her normally sharp eyes were dreamy and star strewn, she watched the smoke dancing both in and out of her mind as something vaguely reminiscent of Pink Floyd wafted out of one of the rooms down the hall. It seemed, ironically, to bring reality in with it. Candy passed the spliff off to a friend of hers with dishwater blonde hair and reclined against the shoddily patched upholstery.

“He’s leaving me.” She said, matter of factly. She was about to become the thing she dreaded most. A bring down. “After two years. He’s going to go…just because…”

Her friend is laughing, not at what Candy said, but at whatever fired in her brain as she inhaled the chemical laden smoke. She meant to ask what Candice was talking about, but it was lost in the haze that soon enveloped her, reducing her thoughts to a swirl of sound bites from philosophy lectures and clips from music videos.

Candy had to pee. She got up, carefully unfolding her shapely legs from beneath her and again adjusted the sweater. It was her only concession to modesty, well, that and the pink cotton panties she wore underneath. She itched at the back of her head and started, with a slight tilt, heading down the hallway towards the bathroom.

She stopped at the wrong door, but it was on purpose. She turned the knob and looked into an empty room with a naked bulb in the center. She flipped the switch by the door killing the light. The marijuana was playing with her understanding of time and space. He wasn’t leaving her. He’d already left.

She sucked back a sob and made for the bathroom.

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Not Johnny was wearing gloves when he got his prescription filled at his new drug store. Since the day in the bank, he hadn’t gone anywhere without some sort of protection. He was still trying to work it all out, trying to figure out what it was he could do, and how it happened. He was scared. It was strange that he was more scared of what he could do now then of dying.

It had happened again, what he could do, that is. A couple of times when he was out, if things started going wrong and he started to get upset, it started to happen. It began, he noted, with a little bit of a buzz in his own head and a tingle somewhere up between his shoulders. Next, his right eye would twitch, ever so slightly, and that meant that the people around him were pretty much fucked.

He seemed to broadcast something which induced either a stiff headache in the luckiest or a full seizure in the most susceptible. But there was a key. He discovered he could get as angry as he wanted while he was on his medication. It worked against him the first time he made the correlation, actually.

Not Johnny was dealing with a store clerk who had apparently gone to idiot school and graduated with flying colors. Not Johnny heard the buzz. He felt the tingle between his shoulders, hell, he even smiled a little bit as he waited for the right eye to twitch. The clerk looked like a bleeder. Not Johnny started to characterize the people he interacted with based on how he felt they would react to one of his episodes. Bleeders were rare. Pistol had been a bleeder, from the nose. This guy looked like a bleeder.

But his right eye wouldn’t twitch, no matter how angry and pissed off he could make himself. Not Johnny eventually gave up and went home, fuming. In a way, it kind of made sense. The one time he wanted that terrible whatever it was to come on, it wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.

Then later that night, he got sloppy, forgot a dose of his medication, and promptly blew up his microwave. Whatever he was doing, it had to be electrically based. If it had to do with electricity, Not Johnny knew exactly the man to see.
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Jack Dunn was like a latter day re-incarnation of Nikola Tesla when it came to dealing with anything even remotely electrical in nature. If the problem of his peculiarly short attention span could be addressed, the world would have to watch out. As it was, he’d already designed and tested a Rail Gun which, to pardon the pun, blew the Navy’s project right out of the water. His famously bad memory and knack for writing project notes in an illegible scrawl prevented him from replicating his results once he burned out the original. It was a somewhat sore subject, and best not to comment on.

Not Johnny’s proposition was sufficient to lock down even Dunn’s rabbit on a hot griddle attention span for a while. A bit of a masochist, his first insistence was that he get to experience “the full burn” as he termed it. He told Not Johnny to come back when he was three days off his medicine and totally pissed off.

Despite his propensity for doing the exact opposite of what he was told, Not Johnny followed instructions and returned when properly primed. Dunn, not content to wait for any sort of lengthy build up, began agitating Not Johnny immediately. When it happened, and it felt almost reflexive, almost like he was using a new muscle that he was just learning to access, “the full burn” knocked Dunn straight off his feet and left him twitching for about a minute, even after Not Johnny hastily exited the room.

When, with a dose of his medicine fifteen minutes into his system, Not Johnny returned, he found Dunn, sitting on the floor, scribbling out notes. This was not unusual, but the notes were actually legible, which was entirely unprecedented.

“I have an idea.” He said, with a somewhat manic glee.

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Coates was in the car again. That blasted piece of shit car, with more of it falling apart every day. If he had a better head for money, and if he wasn’t putting both of his kids through school…he had to stop himself there. It was never good to start a day off by lying to yourself. He knew exactly where most of his money had been going. He was buying private investigators and consultants off for years. Any scrap of information about his wife’s murderer drew him like whiskey draws a priest. That was actually a quote he’d gotten from some book he read in College. He was so broke, even his wit was borrowed.

Then, when the time came and he actually had something pressing that needed to be paid for, he kept coming up short. Looking back on it, he’d made a lot of mistakes. That is why it had to come out right this time. This couldn’t be another dead end. He wouldn’t let it.

The files were there on the passenger seat. They weren’t much, but they were something. He grumbled at the rain on his windshield for as long as he could, but when he lost the ability to see through the glass, he had to palm the wiper control. This left streaks and scratches, yet another aspect of the car’s upkeep he had neglected to attend to. He’d never been much for them in the first place. Just something that gets you from point a to point b. Well, sometimes.

“Bullshit.” He said to himself. He had better things to be doing, more on his mind, then the bullshit case he had been assigned to. He was part of a task force. This was good and bad, but it made no impact on his ride into the station first thing in the morning.

Terrence’s superiors were wonderfully short sighted. Closing a forgotten murder didn’t bring in that much good press, but tracking down the news maker of the day, well, there’s something to squander one hundred man hours a week on.

He shook his head at the quarter of his face he caught in the mirror. No wonder she left.

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Not Johnny was on his way to back to Dunn’s for the unveiling of his findings, the final report. Well, it probably wasn’t meant to be the final report, but two weeks of inane “testing” had been quite enough. Not Johnny didn’t know how much time he had left, but he did know he was not about to spend all of it getting poked, prodded, shocked, and scanned in a cold warehouse by the waterfront.

Especially not with the weather turning like it was. Not Johnny’s bones were no fans of cold like that.

The car was old, but in good condition, which is to say the heater worked and worked well. It pulled a little to the right, and thanks to that fact Not Johnny almost creamed a pedestrian when a particularly vicious pain spike, as he referred to them, shot up his spine to lodge somewhere in his nervous system. It felt like he’d been stabbed by a white hot piece of rebar. He vaguely wondered if Dunn was testing the rail gun again, but the thought vanished as he jerked the wheel back the other way and stood up on his breaks.

“You stupid jerk!” A young woman shouted, pounding on the hood with her fists. She was really upset. Really upset, as in, stomping up to the driver’s side and banging on the window. She was wearing rings on various fingers of both hands and they made a staggered clickety clack when she drummed her palms against the glass.

The window didn’t roll down reliably, so, with some concern for both his and her continued safety, Not Johnny put the car in park, killed the ignition and opened the door. It was beginning to rain.

“I’m really sorry.” He said, meaning it. “I didn’t see you and the car is a little messed up. I’m really sorry.”

“I’m really sorry,” she mocked him, “What does that do? What are you sorry about, that you almost hit me or that I’m not happy about it.” She was cute, in a bitchy sort of way. The rain, rolling down her face, was a nice effect.

“Where are you going?” He asked.

“None of your business. No where with you.” She said, drawing the collar of her jacket up as the rain continued to steadily increase.

“Fine.” Not Johnny said, pulling his door shut. He turned the key in the ignition, and then there she was, banging her rings against his window again. He left the engine running but opened the door again, this time with a smile. “Where can I drop you off?”

She was about to argue some more, but thought better of it and made her way around to the passenger seat. She pulled the door open and slid in, her backpack of a purse came off her shoulder and settled into her lap. She held a small canister, the contents of which Not Johnny could guess, in her right hand and studied him cautiously with her eyes.

“Here.” Not Johnny said, turning the heater up and diverting some of the middle vents towards his passenger.

“Thanks.” She said, as if it were one of the top three things in life she’d vowed never to say. She was pretty in a darkly, angry, sort of way. Not Johnny had to modify his earlier estimation slightly. She looked college girled out, in a coffee house sort of way, but at the same time older, though, somehow, not in a bad way.

“I’m Candice,” She said, offering a dainty handshake “the girl you almost ran over and killed.”

To that there was only one reply. “I’m not Johnny.”

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More to come...