(no subject)

Sep. 9th, 2025 08:41 pm
jackabbot: (ohwhatfreshhell)
[personal profile] jackabbot posting in [community profile] thecityneversleeps
September 7, 2025:

Jack Abbot arrives in Darrow. Robby is there to attempt to explain things

[ HERE | ongoing | profanity ]

(no subject)

Sep. 9th, 2025 07:15 pm
jackabbot: (casual)
[personal profile] jackabbot posting in [community profile] thecityneversleeps
Jack had been in this city -- Darrow -- for approximately 36 hours. In that time, he’d gotten his information packet, found his apartment, and done a whole lot of walking around trying to understand what was where. Robby had done his best to explain the unexplainable, which was fortunately something that they both did regularly, and Jack had accepted that at least for now, this was where he was. His mind and his body were still on nights, which he wanted to maintain, if he could, but there were plenty of errands and little tasks that couldn’t be avoided when someone moved to a new town, involuntarily or not, and most of those had to happen during the day.  He would need to find a doctor, a therapist, a prosthetist, and a PT, at a minimum.  After all that was handled, he could find out if the hospital here was hiring. Robby had been confident they’d hire Jack, but if they didn’t need another ER attending, they wouldn’t be creating a position just for him, no matter how much Robby talked him up. He’d have to see if there was an urgent care or standalone ER somewhere. It didn’t seem large enough for that, but what did he know?

For now, though, he was adding a new task to his mental list.  He'd gotten food for his apartment and bought some clothes so he could change out of the black scrubs he'd arrived wearing. Now he needed something that kept his coffee warm and could survive being dropped, but he didn’t want anything too fancy. He just needed a decent tumbler and some coffee to put in it, and he was looking through the options at a little coffee shop near his new apartment (which did not have an Ocean View, but it wasn’t far, either). He picked up a matte black one that came with three separate lid options and considered it. He wasn’t sure why he needed three separate lids for one tumbler. That just seemed overly complicated.

“Have you tried any of these?” he asked the person next to him. They were in the coffee shop, so they might have an idea or an opinion. Or, with his recent luck, they’d just be there to get a gift card and had never had coffee in their life.

[[First public post for Jack!  Find him in any coffee shop you like wearing a solid-colored t-shirt and cargo pants. Open till this says otherwise.]]

(no subject)

Sep. 5th, 2025 07:10 pm
dumbfuckingfartknockers: (startled)
[personal profile] dumbfuckingfartknockers posting in [community profile] thecityneversleeps
There’s a naked woman in the street.

Gwenny was leaving her martial arts class — she and Neil had agreed that it’s less to learn how to fight as to learn when to fight — and headed to her bus stop when she’d seen her. It’s hard to fucking miss, if she’s honest.

The lady is standing there, utterly still. Her skin is a pale, grayish color. Her hair is in sopping black hanks. Her tits sag flat against her ribs and her belly is soft between the wings her of hips. There’s a streak of blood running up from her navel, up her breast bone, up her throat.

Gwenny swallows hard.

cut for horror-typical graphic depiction of a dead body )

Nobody else can see her.

That isn’t really a surprise so much as it is a disappointment. Every time Gwenny remembers she can see them and most other people can’t, she’s reminded of how lonely it can be, and how lonely it must be, for the ghosts.

Gwenny tugs her phone out and taps out a text — ghost shit, hang on — and then puts it away again. When she looks back up, though, the ghost is gone.

“Shit,” she mumbles.

“Hhhhhhh…”

Gwenny yelps and spins, flailing away when the ghost hisses so close to her ear. She tries to compose herself — nobody else can see her, so everyone just saw a tween shriek at nothing — and frowns.

“You can’t just scare me like that,” she scolds. The ghost’s eyes flick over her face, and Gwenny almost thinks she can feel how wet they are.

“Hhhhh,” the ghost tries again.

Oh, fuck. She wants to talk, but can’t. She doesn’t have any fucking lips.

Three minutes later, Gwenny’s playing a really bad game of charades with a faceless naked lady in the middle of the street.

“No, egg, I got it,” she says, brow pulled low in focus. The ghost’s hands are cupped between them, but when she says that, they drop again. “I just don’t know what about eggs. You gotta give me more than that.”

[ Gwenny is trying to communicate with a truly horrifying-looking ghost, potentially about something incredibly mundane. If you can see ghosts, you’ll probably catch pretty quick that she means no harm and is just restless and worried about something. If you can’t see ghosts… well, then you’ll definitely see a twelve year old talking to the open air with exasperation and growing impatience XD timed to the afternoon! Feel free to say Gwenny texted your pup or that you stumbled across the scene yourself. Open until this reads otherwise! ]

(no subject)

Sep. 5th, 2025 06:18 pm
napalm_era: (brainstorming)
[personal profile] napalm_era posting in [community profile] thecityneversleeps
It was sort of an accident.

Last week, Mira had been scrolling through suddengram flicks, those short little videos that look like instagram reels but for some reason just aren't, and she'd seen a video that'd annoyed her so much she'd had to try to correct it.

Someone had commented on another video, a video Mira hadn't bothered watching, asking how to tell if someone liked them. The poster of the video answered them in another one — the one Mira had seen, the comment just a bubble in the video's overlay — and had given the worst advice Mira had ever seen. ‘Get your friends to find out’? ‘Stage an encounter to make them jealous’? What the hell kind of juvenile, schoolyard advice was that? She hadn't even meant to start recording, but the next thing she knew, she was giving the video a whole dressing-down.

“Just ask them,” she'd continued, pacing through the park with her earbud mic hanging down by her chin. “Life isn't a movie, and acting like it is will just make everything worse.” She'd said more — it'd ended up being a nearly three-minute-long video, even after trimming down some of the dead-air where she’d tried to get her thoughts in order — and then after she'd hit ‘post’, she'd sort of put it from her mind.

And then it had blown. Up.

The next morning, she'd checked her phone and had seen that her suddengram had hundreds of notifications. Her video had what felt like a billion comments under it, whole chains of people agreeing or disagreeing with her, with each other, with themselves, and Mira had sort of lost herself in reading through them all.

Most of them were basic. ‘Yas queen!’ and stuff like that. Some of them argued with her or defended the original video.

One of them had stood out to her a lot.

lol wish I had someone like you giving me advice when I was a teen

She knows what that’s like. God does she know what that’s like.

And it's probably kind of dumb, but here she is, sitting outside and scratching in a composition notebook like she’s trying to be Zoey writing lyrics.

Except she's spitballing channel names, instead.

Dear Diary
Real Talk
Reel Talk - bring insta back?
AMA ???
ugh this is so dumb

The last one isn't a title, but a comment she scribbles down as she rolls her eyes. This is so dumb, she thinks. Why would she ever think she’d be the right person for this?

That one comment comes back to her, though. wish I had someone like you giving me advice when I was a teen. Mira considers that for a few moments, then drags her pen through the letters in a sharp side-to-side. Whether or not this is dumb, her words touched one person. One is enough. One is more than none.

Ask Mira, she writes, and then sighs and tilts her head.

“I dunno, maybe simple is just what it needs,” she says, mostly to herself but loudly enough that anyone walking by would hear her.

[ overhear Mira talking to herself at any outdoors seating area of your choice — cafe, park, beach, wherever! — at any time of your choice! She’s often blunt and a little abrasive with strangers, but don’t let that stop you from nosing in on her business XD feel free to have observed her recording herself last week in the park, feel free to have seen her video and recognize her, or just notice that she’s a tall, pink-haired bad bitch talking to herself in public XD up to you! Open to all until this reads otherwise ]

MEME: Fuck-Marry-Kill

Sep. 4th, 2025 04:42 pm
citycouncil: (chance)
[personal profile] citycouncil posting in [community profile] cityarcade
Top-level your characters and others will respond with a list of three people for them to place in one of three categories.

• fuck / marry / kill
• hug / best friends / block
• slow burn / fake date / enemies-to-lovers

Feel free to select one of the above as the default for your character, or, if someone hasn't specified, to do so yourself when offering up options. Or just wing it! Bonus points for explanations, and the people listed, of course, do not have to be fellow citizens or even people they know.

we were lightning from the start

Sep. 3rd, 2025 12:04 am
perfectallkill: (life is 아름다운 galaxy)
[personal profile] perfectallkill posting in [community profile] thecityneversleeps
To say Rumi is displeased to be in Darrow would be a vast understatement. It helps more than she can say to have Mira here, too, even if they've yet to find any sign that Zoey is in the city with them. It would just be a lot nicer if they could simply... go home. As far as she can tell, though, everything she was told is true. Until this city lets them go, they're stuck here.

She dragged her feet through the first week or so of her stay, but reuniting with Mira has at least helped her accept that they're going to be here a while. It doesn't keep her from resenting the very idea of it, but there's no point living like they're on tour or something. If she has her way, their time here will be brief, but refusing to settle in won't help her. She has money from the city and there's no reason not to use it for whatever little things she needs — clothes, groceries, notebooks and pens.

Though she initially tries to talk herself out of anything bigger, she gives up in short order, stopping by a little music store to buy a used guitar. She can live on ramyeon for a week or however long, but if she has to go another two weeks without making any kind of music, she'll probably go insane, so this, too, counts as a necessity.

Truthfully, when it comes to being an idol, she's been incredibly lucky. She recognizes that she's had it way easier than most. With Celine raising her, her mom's legacy, the knowledge that her place in a group was guaranteed, she never had to contend with the stress other trainees felt, wondering whether or not she'd ever get signed. It was always just a matter of waiting until Celine had the right trio, that's all. She knows people talked about her because of it, that there are still plenty of antis who call her a dozen, but she doesn't let that bother her much. She knows the truth of her talent; she's seen it for herself in lines of shimmering blue and gold written across Seoul. Her voice is one thing Rumi is confident about.

Because her place in Huntr/x was sealed before the group even had a name, let alone other members, and because Celine was so focused on shooting them straight to the top, they skipped a lot of the coming-of-age rites other rookie groups go through. And Rumi's not going to pretend she wishes they'd struggled. She's thankful their path was a flower road from the start. Even so, the fact that they never had to do busking was a little disappointing. The closest she ever came was an episode of Begin Again. It's not the same.

She sets up on the boardwalk, just her and her new-old guitar, a cheap mic clipped to her hoodie. She just wants to keep it simple: a folding chair, set up in as shady a place as she can find on the old wooden path. There are a couple bottles of water tucked behind the chair so she can stay hydrated and a speaker behind her guitar case where it's laid on the ground. Other than that, it's just the way the strings feel under her fingers as she starts playing familiar songs.

Back home, she rarely even got to do covers. Celine was so precious about their image. Here, there's no one to remind her to go over her choices with the team and strategize, picking songs that won't cause any negative sentiments or comparisons, steering her away from music by her contemporaries or hoobaes. It's just Rumi, singing what she likes, though she carefully chose a handful of songs in English, since that seems to be the language most Darrow residents speak.

Ooh, no matter what, you got me,
I got you, and I wouldn't want it any other way
Ooh, no drop of doubt, I know deep down that
We'll make it through
Just like we always do


She focuses on the music, her eyes almost closed at first, but she knows by now — call it instinct or training — how to work a crowd, and a crowd is undeniably beginning to form. She stops playing long enough to get them clapping rhythmically along, diving back into the warm notes of the chorus, her voice rising sweetly over the sounds of the crowd and the waves. One song becomes another and another, and for the first time in longer than she cares to think about, the music is just... music, stripped of all the responsibility it's had to carry for so long. That she's had to carry. By the time she finishes up, the sun is starting to set, and Rumi feels lighter than she has in a long, long time.

[ Come find Rumi somewhere on the Darrow Boardwalk! Either find her playing or wrapping up or say she took a break to get a snack, whatever strikes your fancy/is most accessible. I threw together a playlist of some songs that she might play, so feel free to say it's any of these in a very stripped down acoustic rendition. The one used in the post is "I Got You" by Twice, but anything goes, so if you'd rather your pup come across her playing, e.g., Taylor Swift's "Cruel Summer" instead, have at it. And if you haven't yet heard her sing, here's a link to "Golden," one of her group's singles in canon. Set to any point on Wednesday. Open until this says otherwise. ]

(no subject)

Sep. 1st, 2025 02:35 pm
number1_himbo: (Default)
[personal profile] number1_himbo posting in [community profile] thecityneversleeps
It's a lovely day on the cusp of autumn, warm but not quite hot, a cool breeze, the sun bright.

A perfect day, Luther decides, for some antiquing. Real, deep antiquing like he hasn't engaged in since-- well, he's not sure. Timeline fuckery and all.

Plenty of finds pop up at a local flea market, which just happens to be steps from an actual antique shop. A couple of cool lamps with stained glass depicting various colored bees, an old and military-looking footlocker, a mirror with a jet black surface, all of it very tempting.

He's not really looking for anything in particular, so much as he wants to examine it all, when he finds a sconce. The sconce, the one he'd been holding when their little Christmas road trip literally got shot to hell.

The same sconce that has dozens of identical brothers and sisters back at the house, dropped behind as they'd fled that day.

It looks undamaged, at least. That's good, only-- only he's not so sure he's undamaged. Luther takes a few shaky steps and then drops down on a bench that reverberates with the sudden weight.

"Haven't see you in a while," Luther murmurs, turning the sconce over in his hands. "You know, some people get boats," he adds, looking up briefly at the sky.

"Sorry," he says to the sconce. "You're just awfully heavy with old memories that may or may not have happened." The academy, sure, but what he's thinking about is those years squatting at the house, trying to rebuild.

Alone.

Luther's pulled from the little storm cloud of hurt and resentments by a voice.

"There it is! That suspiciously large man has it right ever there!" He glances up to see the woman, white-haired and decked out in one hell of a housedress, glaring. "You there, you! I had that picked out last Sunday--"

And it goes on for a while, Luther holding the sconce protectively to his chest, the woman yelling, and a harried sell coming to stand helpless nearby.


[Stop by and help Luther out, or don't! But please do. Open to all, a good time to meet him.]
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