D2 :: Sevyn Von Hell

how far can you see... all about the world?
have you ever wondered all about the world?
everybody here stop (except me)
until i see everything: my time, space, light speed
all about the universe, it's all about to be reversed
can you see?

"So." Salem sits awkwardly on the... foot(???) of the... thing Sevyn calls her bed. "How does this work?" Usually her friends in A/V club don't prank her, because they all know her history of being bullied by people telling her weird lies about social situations she didn't understand, but something feels decidedly off, even for someone as gullible as Salem. It's on the floor, for starters, looking like it was tossed into the middle of the basement and left exactly the way it landed. Completely askew. Crumpled, somehow? Also, while there's probably a mattress in there somewhere, it's very difficult to find beneath the tangle of... leather(???) sheets. Maybe they're waxed denim. Or some sort of grainy vinyl. All of the above? They are uncomfortable. Sheets should never be any of these textures.

"You sleep on it," Sevyn answers without a hint of sarcasm in her voice, always taking Salem's questions seriously and without patronizing her for not understanding certain things in the same ways that other people do. This is not what she was asking about, but all things considered... good to know.

Some parts of the mattress(???) creak like springs while other areas suddenly disappear entirely and swallow a misplaced hand as if discovering a black hole by being fed to it. One area Salem accidentally touched was painfully hard, a little bit spiky, and... maybe she misheard, but wasn't it faintly buzzing? There are plenty of electrical chords criss-crossing beneath the whole situation, so it's feasible that it has been mechanized for some unfathomable reason. Basically everything else in this basement is a computer, so the bed(???) might be too.

"Clarification: I meant how does... all of this work?" Salem gestures at the machines densely stacked against every wall around them. Some she recognizes — besides various microprocessors and glossy screens of all sorts, there is the occasional gaming console, printer, copy machine, or projector mixed in. A choice selection of low-tech recording equipment sits in one corner with crates of salvaged chips and wires, next to a work bench with more soldering iron options than Salem has ever seen in a single location before. Besides the power strips and extension cords entangling their feet, plenty more electrical wiring has been strung up on the joists above them.

Raising one eyebrow, Sevyn glances up from her rhythmic typing. Salem can't be serious. "Blink-y metal boxes go WHIRRRRR."

"That is a Hatchet-answer." Salem wrinkles her nose and sucks at her teeth as if there's a gross taste of regret in her mouth. She doesn't like bragging about her intelligence. "I am Salem. I know what a computer is."

A husky giggle slithers around the room. "I'm joking you." Oh. That makes sense. It seems so apparent now. "Because you obviously know what computers are. You don't need me to explain something that I know you already know." On most topics Salem knows more than Sevyn, who puts all of her energy into the very specific things she is interested in and stubbornly refuses to engage with much else. She likes computers and salvaging old tech. She likes games, which is exceedingly convenient for the daughter of an arcade owner. She likes exploiting the so-called system, despite refusing to go into any particular detail about what exactly the system is. She likes artificially flavored snacks. Cheese balls are her favorite — the labels on their barrel-sized containers have all been changed to read: HACKER FUEL — and she usually eats them as if playing a game. Lots of throwing is involved.



"I wanted to know how you would explain it," Salem admits, sitting up straight and moving her hands to her lap so that textures stop happening to her. "I am not very good at explaining things like computers."



"Neither am I." Sevyn enters some kind of command on a transparent plastic keyboard with rainbow lights illuminating the circuitry. Pixelated mice wearing sunglasses are suddenly dancing on more than a dozen of the computer screens surrounding them. Cute! Salem loves mice. Sevyn knows this. "It's because I'm too good at them." With one slick PUSH she rapidly wheels her chair across the only cleared floor space in the room. It is meticulously empty. This must be the reason why. "Things are easiest to explain when someone is only okay at them, because there are fewer things to choose between saying when you only know one or two things. If you know a million things then the answer is harder to pick out from the mental crowd. It becomes overwhelming. Besides, these machines shouldn't be explained with one easy answer," she continues typing into a new keyboard "if for no other reason than most of them do totally different things."

Hanging out with Sevyn is... peaceful. Their conversations make more sense than anyone else Salem knows. She never wonders what Sevyn means because explanations come easy and sometimes, like right now, her friend casually manages to put into words things that Salem has struggled her entire life to articulate. A small weight that she didn't know she had been carrying around disappears in an instant. The mental crowd. Yes. Salem's mind is often overcrowded when trying to talk to people and all too often she seems to choose the wrong things to say, despite feeling like she knows so many correct answers to so many different things. Too many answers.

With an abrupt whirl, Sevyn spins around to face Salem, staring her in the eyes with the utmost seriousness. Salem does her best to hold eye contact, but quickly settles for fixating on her friend's nose. "I need to know more about this Winnie person." Oh. "I still haven't decided if I want to help. Security set-ups aren't really... my thing." She prefers exploiting them. Well, in actuality she prefers having nothing to do with them and focusing on illegally distributing her video game emulations. Game Girl, PlayDepot, GameBlock, 9/10-DOH Shift, Saga Genesis — besides the coin-ops upstairs, she dabbles in any kind of system she can get her hands on.

Rumor has it that the junkyard near the peacekeeping headquarters just got six more out-of-commission hovercraft in. Sevyn could be out there right now scavenging for touchscreens and high quality joystick parts — it's always the screens and the sensors for rotating controller pieces that are the most difficult parts to source; re-coding different types of cartridges onto whatever junk she has laying around is never a problem. Instead she's spending her Saturday here, because she's a sucker who cares more about her stupid friendships than money. If only she were greedier then she could rule the underworld.

A couple of weeks ago Salem asked Sevyn to help with setting up a security system for the abandoned parking garage where her non-A/V club friends are apparently... living? The whole situation sounds wild. Like, way beyond suspicious. Something really bad is one thousand percent going down. Wilder has already been stealing weapons from the training center for an arsenal, which somehow isn't even the crazy part of the story.

The part that has been nagging at Sevyn is this Winnie person. Winnie Gallows. (Definitely not her real name, considering Sevyn hasn't been able to dig up a single hospital record, reaping registration, or any other kind of official District Two documentation — public or private — for a Winnie, Winnifred, Winona, Wynne, Edwina, Gwyneth, Guinevere, Gwendolyn, or any other plausible variation of the name in any of the few and far between Gallows family trees of District Two.) She's a fully grown woman, guesstimated to be in her late twenties or early thirties, who showed up with a fluorescent pink AK-47 one night and opened fire on a bunch of teenage girls before bursting into apologetic tears and giving them keys to the basement so they could live in the parking garage more permanently. Apparently she claims that she owns the property, but in reality it's not registered to her. The garage is registered under the oh-so-vaguely named Central Property Management, LLC. Obviously she didn't think a bunch of teenagers would know how to look into something like that. Ha.

Only a drool-for-brains halfwit would put their fingerprints on anything having to do with any of this.

"I already told you everything I know about her." Salem's eyes drift from holding her gaze on Sevyn's nose to staring at her shoes. Truly, one of the world's worst liars.

"Uh-huh. You told me every fact you know." Sevyn pauses, contemplating her wording very carefully. There is a correct way to unravel this mystery, if only she chooses the right angle. Her thoughts begin jostling one another, different options attempting to elbow their way to the front of the line. "But what are your educated guesses about Winnie? Your theories?"

Wide brown eyes immediately flick upward, telling on Salem's resistance to spreading rumors. Rumors are scary social monsters, but theories... theories are objective. Some of the conversations she has overheard have been deeply private, but Sevyn is the best secret keeper she knows. "Someone she is acquainted with previously resided in the space we now occupy. He would come and go at unpredictable intervals, but he has not returned in years. That is why there were provisions such as non-perishable food, bedding, and a furnace already." Hesitation visibly tugs at Salem and she begins fidgeting with the sheets before jerking her hands back, remembering textures, and wipes the feel of them off of her skin by running her hands over her own shirt. "I hypothesize that Winnie abandoned a child as a teenager. This would account for her erratic emotional state when interacting with adolescents of our age range; her own child would be a teenager today. That man likely provided assistance at the time of her pregnancy. Aside from shelter, there is some other way in which she continues to aid him in return, but I have not become privilege to any details. When she spoke to me about setting up cameras and silent alarms, she stated that her concerns were for our safety, but I postulate that this is not the primary motive. Her ownership of the assault riffle predates our arrival. It is a parking garage. Combat weapons intended for war scenarios are not required to patrol an empty parking garage."

There it is. The real truth. Salem's theories have a habit of containing more reality than what the average person declares to be fact, so Sevyn immediately trusts her guesswork more than pretty much anything anyone else could say on the matter, even (and especially) Winnie herself. There's something in that basement besides a bunch of runaway teenage girls and whatever it is, it's big. Sevyn would bet everything she owns that Winnie's man-friend is one of Panem's most wanted. Cool. Cool cool cool... not.

"You know this is a bad situation, right?"

"Yes," Salem responds with abject honesty. For a long time the only sound is the hum of machinery. "But there is nowhere else for them to go."

"You should stay out of it."

Fingers twitch in midair, reaching out for the horrible sheets — over and over — before pulling away at the last moment as Salem remembers that she shouldn't touch such excruciating things. Then her thoughts switch back to worry and suddenly her fingers begin seeking something to fidget with again. Stop short. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. "Nox is there." She feels broken with wanting. Nox saved Salem's life in more ways than one; now she wants to return the favor. These words obviously translate to mean: It's too late to stay out. I'm already in.

"UUUUUUUUUUUUUUURGH." Sevyn's groan is halfway to a bellow of frustration. Her brain restates the obvious: Only a drool-for-brains halfwit would put their fingerprints on anything having to do with any of this. Her eyes roll into the back of her head as she tags herself. Great. Yeah. Okay. She's the drool-for-brains halfwit. "I'll do it."

The mice are still dancing happily. Salem doesn't share their smiles anymore, she just looks guilty.

There is a point at which loyalty becomes a fault and this is not the first time in Sevyn's life that she has crossed this line. She hopes it will be the last. It didn't end well for her last time and she would hate Odd Fawkes for it if she were able to force her emotions to work that way instead of just pretending endless apathy; Sevyn doesn't want her friendship with Salem to turn into a second iteration of that confusing mess. She also doesn't want Salem to turn up dead.

"C'mon. The Shear Hill junkyard just got a bunch of hovercraft in. Let's go salvage some cameras. Maybe I can charge Winnie enough to cover Nox renting out a room somewhere."

"Oh, I—"

"Nuh-uh," Sevyn's firmly upheld hand silences Salem's inevitable excuses for refusal. "Don't want to hear it. You're totally coming with me. Grab a pair of gloves from the bin —" No fingerprints. "— you're my hands now, babe." Her signature antagonistic smirk is tinged with preemptive regret as she straightens her sunglasses and stands. "Congrats on your new apprenticeship."

the world of experience was actually different to reality
don't separate the right and the wrong
now is the moment, like eternity
the expansion of consciousness invited us to this new world
are you surprised? don't be surprised
why am i so serious? why don’t you be curious, babe



^{brave new world by brown eyed girls.}