Well Past Curfew [open]

A quick glance at her Unity Link told her that if she closed her eyes and passed out right this second, she'd be pushing around four hours of rest. But even if she unplugged from her speakers, crushed some melatonin, threw a blanket over her head, and pretended that she hadn't slammed back three tall energy drinks, Esther didn't see that as likely.

Being born a night owl was another curse of hers, or else it was a bad habit she'd developed from living with her family until Beata. This hour was the only real time she could get to herself. Esther leaned back in the crook of her window frame, swaddled up in a blanket with the nub of a cigarette between her fingers, puffing smoke tactically out through the thin opening in the glass. She balanced a laptop in her lap, blaring Fugazi and the Misfits without any headphones, shoving handfuls of chips into her mouth as she scrolled through page after page of Esper feeds. Every once and awhile, something just the right combination of inane and risible would fly by, and she'd lip her cigarette to free her hands for a flurry of mad typing.

Esther probably planted at least ten, eleven, twenty, sixty-ish nasty anonymous bombs like this. Stuff like, "bitch is that your chin or a tumor?" Or, "you look like mr. digby's aborted son."

This was how she unwound.

And still, in four hours, she'd still have her perfect attendance record. Her powers gave her a way of slipping through the cracks, so the Academy had its own personalized ways of keeping track of students like her. It worked just like a punch clock. Punch in when class starts, punch out when class is over. Otherwise, the teacher would never know if she had been there or not. That gave her the leeway to power-nap through first, second, third period, blissfully unbothered.

She rummaged for another fistful of chips, blissfully unaware of sounds from down the hallway.

The night was, obviously, no longer young at this point. Middle-aged, pushing towards balding, maybe. But she wasn't by any means out to party, ever since she had slipped out the window of her bedroom. She just needed to get away from her weird family, who loved to be up at the exact time as her, doing whatever other people do while she catches up on whichever show was capturing her attention that night. Sometimes losing her mind over how good-looking the occasional actress was. Casual teenage stuff, who cares.

And after staring at a street light for about an entire hour, unmoving and occasionally approached by the local passerby only for them to draw away at the sight of the morphed face, mouth stretched wide and jagged, antenna emerging from her temple, she decided that she should retire someplace quiet. Not home, of course. She didn't want her family to see her like this - she didn't want anyone in the entire Foxhaven to see her like this. Shame had nothing to do with it, but it wasn't like she was especially proud of what her gift turned her into. The halls of Beata were hopefully much more brimming with creeps and insomniacs who would give her awkward finger guns if they crossed paths.

So she gave each hall a thorough sweep, trying and failing to get the abnormal features of her face to calm down and return to just a slightly stupid looking nose and pimples. It was only when she heard faint music that her footsteps found a general direction, tracking its source. Her head bobbed up and down with the rhythm as she followed, seeming more like something inhuman - which she, in theory, was? She wasn't sure, and she wasn't going to open a book to find out. Research was for suckers.

"Yo," Ruth huffed out when she finally reached the source, someone playing music by the window - hopefully not very squeamish about appearances and such. "I think my dad listens to that."

Through the harsh, grinding guitar tones and percussion, Esther couldn't be sure she hadn't just imagined a voice on the other side of the glass, but she still instinctively turned her head. The cigarette tumbled out from between her lips as her jaw dropped open, disappearing somewhere in the dark gap between her bed and the wall. The thing at her window, well, it was something directly out of a Misfits lyric. White hair draped over a human-shaped head and human-sized shoulders, but the face was a grotesque imitation of a bug's bulging eyes, carved mouth, and even a pair of fan-like antennae. She felt a burst of fight-or-flight panic well up inside her, and could have screamed or jumped or thrown her laptop through the glass, but instead Esther felt herself seize up, unable to budge an inch.

Was this happening because she didn't repost that stupid chain letter? Was it definitely tobacco in this cigarette?

What the thing said had barely clicked in her mind at first, but after a moment of frozen terror, Esther raised a shaky left hand, index and ring fingers curling into what she hoped was a universal salute for both humans and horrible moth-people: the devil horns. Found at any rock concert anywhere. "Does your dad like to party?" In that second, fear had stripped her down to her basic responses, blurted out on impulse. The snark passed straight from throat into open air without ever passing through her brain first.

So much for finding people who wouldn't be so easily horrified by her inhuman morphing. Could moths smell fear? Was it something they did often? This girl was stinking of it, in that case, and of cigarette smoke, too. Perhaps Ruth had just gotten very good at telling when someone was truly put off by the way she could look, which was every time someone would see her like this. Which didn't make it much a skill.

Her right antenna twitched in response to the salute - she mimicked it lazily, tried to smile, then proceeded to give up when she realized what it must've looked like on her face. The corners of her mouth were already stretched out beyond anything earthly, and they definitely didn't need any more stretching. By this point, a good first impression was likely impossible. Half because of the way she looked, half because they had gotten to the question 'Does you dad like to party?', a lot faster than she had expected. "Yes." she mouthed subtly in response.

"I'll spare your life and return to the abandoned house in woods, where I was murdered as a little girl, if you give me those chips." Ruth added, more clearly. Sometimes it paid to be a grotesque monster.

She wrinkled her face in a morbid sort of awe. "Wicked." Her voice still quavered, even if in her head, she was running through song titles. Cockroach Party Dad. Window Bug. Repost This Song on Esper or You Will Die. Without hesitation and without question, she lightly tossed the chip bag at the gap in the window, but didn't dare move to pop the mesh screen. Not at first, anyway. Esther was still staring in fascination at the - frankly - hideous mandible-like appendages, where the jaw split in a cross-section. "Serious though? Are you legit? What's up with your face, man? I mean, no offense, don't eat me—just asking..." Growing up in Rivers Pointe and rarely venturing into the outside blank world, you couldn't rule anything out.

No hesitation, Ruth dug one of her hands inside the bag, disregarding the crumbs sticking to her sweater's sleeve. This form was good at chewing things - with a spray of even more bits of pieces of chips, she crushed and swallowed the entire handful she had plucked out, and moved on to a second one. "You lose the genetic lottery really bad, like I did, you end up shitty. It's not like you ask every ugly person if they're a monster out to eat ya'. Unless you do?" the monstrous girl-like thing replied. Pronouncing the 'sh' group proved to be particularly difficult, and she took a couple of tries before she finished the entire sentence. Then she took a deep breath, swallowed a third greedy handful. "Got anymore chips?" she demanded, sniffing the contents of the rapidly emptying bag.

"Don't flatter yourself. You're not the ugliest thing I've ever seen. Top five, maybe."  She didn't feel guilty. To her, 'sorry' was a four-letter word. It was impossible to say if Esther even knew what 'guilt' was supposed to feel like, but she did feel... what was it? A pang of sympathy, maybe. The initial shock of a monster appearing at her window at 3 AM leveled into something a bit easier to manage, and she felt like they'd unconsciously climbed a step of mutual understanding. Regardless, her snort of derision conveyed no pity. "If you want to talk about the genetic lottery, we're the winners, sweetheart. You could've been ugly and blank." And then she wouldn't even have an excuse.

She felt a twinge of nausea watching the chips disappear into that ghastly and malformed maw, but couldn't hide a certain morbid curiosity. Jesus, watch it chow... It was the kind of close-up angle to the nightmarish world of insects that you could only get in a nature documentary. And what did humans do when they met interesting animals? They fed them.

Trusting that she wasn't actually the vengeful poltergeist of a little girl, she probably was well in her right to slam the window close and cut the chips off there. Instead, she rolled her eyes, craning down to rifle underneath her bed for her stash of chips. Esther fumbled blindly from her position on the bed, swiping the tips of her nails along the carpet for her stash of junk food, all pilfered from behind the bar at the campus cantina. Chips, cookies, jerky, soda, energy drinks, even stuff she didn't eat or ever intend on eating, real nasty stuff like oatmeal raisin cookies or mini-boxes of Chex cereal. She took it because it was out there in the open, and nobody would ever know it was gone, and who was really going to pay almost 5 credits for a tiny packet of pretzels? It was a victimless crime, and that was the use she got out of her own power.

Instead of the crinkle of a chip bag, she felt a nip of pain, the lit nub of her dropped cigarette charring a hole into the coarse matting. With a flurry of curses, she scooped it up in her curled palm, bouncing it from one hand to another as the heat burned at her skin, finally managing to bat it out the window, the red light disappearing somewhere into the darkness. Esther herself was still stooped down, finally dredging up a party-size bag of cheese puffs dusted in red chili powder. "So, Mothman. What should I call you?" The way the question was intoned, it was impossible to tell if Esther was asking her name, or running through names for a new pet.

Ugly and blank. Ruth didn't agree nor disagree with the girl, instead snapping her maw open, staring motionlessly. She didn't care much for blanks, even if the shit some of them liked to pull at the school events she didn't bother to go to did displease her. They were simply another creature, at least in relation to what she was. Further inquiry into exactly what made this stranger so much above those who lacked gifts, what brought her up on a horse so high Ruth wondered whether she got enough oxygen up there, was left aside. In part because the Summer was much more interested in the food.

She watched the fiery red dot waltz through the air past her and reached out for the bag. Her fingers had an extra sort of sharpness to them, her hands appearing vaguely elongated and narrowed upon closer inspection, but she didn't want to give the girl even more time to analyze her. Quickly, she snatched the bag away and tore it open, making a chili cloud puff in her face, stinging the jagged eye-sockets she saw through.

"Ru." the creature answered through a mouthful of puffs, slightly confused by the mixture of cheesy and hot flavors, but not off-put. The dry 'th' at the end of her own name, another nemesis of hers. "But, I guess Mo'man works, too." Another one of those pesky 'th's. "You?" she asked, mostly in an effort to be polite, before stuffing down a second, ungraceful mouthful.

"Call it a stage name. Nice to meet'cha, Ru." Nice in a morbidly shocking and unexpected way, but nice, she supposed. She grinned, introducing herself with a self-important flourish of her hands. "Esther Wright, the one and only. You probably know my grandpa." Almost all her life, people had been falling over each other trying to ingratiate themselves with her father and uncle and grandfather, and if they couldn't recognize her first name, she at least wanted to be recognized by her last name. "But let me ask you something. Why the hell are you walking around outside?"

"No." Ruth cut in with a confused tip of her head. True, the name did ring a bell a very distant one,, but she couldn't explain to herself exactly why. "Dunno a lot of grandpas." She really didn't. The Tinea family didn't have an extensive community of older folk, or really, any old folk at all. The second question was a very good one. "Not," she filled her mouth with puffs and gulped them down half-chewed, "tired. Also an abomination of the night, so I gotta do my part." she gesticulated towards the empty and dark extent of the courtyard, where she presumed at least three people as freaky as her were wondering, just so that she didn't feel too lonely. "'nd you? Don't you need a ton of beauty sleep to maintain that?"