Amos John Freeman
Jul 26, 2012 1:14:01 GMT -5
Post by Amos Freeman on Jul 26, 2012 1:14:01 GMT -5
The easy S T U F F . . .Name: Amos John Freeman
Nickname: N/A
Age: Seventeen (August 25, 1994)
Member Group: Student
Power(s): Mind Borrowing
Play By: Graham PhillipsLet it F L O W . . .A boy, age 12 and a half, was standing in front of a typical window in a typical middle school classroom. The classroom was on the ground floor, and from it, one could observe a small courtyard where a group of rowdy 8th graders was having lunch. The window was rather grimy around the edges, but clear enough in the center that the boy could see the reflection of his slightly stringy dark hair, acne littered face, and hollowed grey-green eyes. The boy was named Amos Freeman.
The school, it should be noted, was a medium-sized public educational facility in the city of Manchester, New Hampshire. The general agreement was that it was decent, for a public school. It contained several poorly lit hallways and endless rows of wall lockers in that particularly strange and dull shade of brown that is only found in schools and prisons. Its hastily painted cinder block walls had tortured many of Amos's relatives before him, including both of his parents and his older brother.
In twenty minutes or so, Amos would squint at its bricked exterior for the last time. For the moment, however, he was perfectly content to watch the birds in the courtyard peck at the remainders of trampled cafeteria food in blissful ignorance.
A warning bell rang out over the aging intercom system, signaling five minutes until the beginning of fourth period. Fourth period was math, and Amos hated math. It was a small comfort to know that it was the only thing that stood between him and the malodorous blue leather seat of his school bus. He sighed wearily, learned forward in partial defeat, and proceeded to do the single most important thing he would ever do in his life.
He ate a bit of discarded French fry off of the courtyard cement.
Amos had never shared thoughts with a pigeon before this point, and although the French fry had been quite tasty after all, he was frankly a bit disgusted at this blatant disregard for the the thirty second rule. The pigeon, of course, made no discerning comments either way; the inability of pigeons to feel shame at such an act is the only reasonable explanation for their continued existence.
In the future, Amos would recall the little details about the borrowing that he had missed due to shock: the swirl of colors so vivid they felt alive; the disorienting sensation of having an absurdly wide field of vision; the peculiar way that a blood-curdling scream resonates in the mind of an animal whose greatest worry is which parking lot to infest next.
The jarring sound, which had in fact been made by his English teacher Mrs. Gibson, startled the poor bird into flight and catapulted Amos back into his own body, where he realized immediately that his head hurt.
"Oh, my God," she murmured, her hovering face twisted in panic. Amos blinked from his supine position on the gritty tile floor. There was the sound of chairs and desks being slid out of the way so that their owners could get a better look at the action. "Sweetheart, are you alright?"
Amos raised a hand to the hot, throbbing point of pain above his right eyebrow, and came away with bloody fingers.
"You fell," Mrs. Gibson pressed on, undeterred by this non-response. "And banged your head on the desk there. I've sent William to get the school nurse, and she's going to call an ambulance. It's all going to be fine." As if on cue, the rather plump head nurse shuffled into the room, followed by the vice-principal, a seventh grade science teacher who had just happened to be nearby, and his classmate William, who wasn't quite sure what was going on but was glad he was somehow in the middle of it all.
He could hear sirens outside.
"I'm okay," Amos said finally, endeavoring to sit up. There was the collective hush of every adult present holding his or her breath. He wiped some more blood off of his forehead with a more confident swipe. "I feel fine."
But there are some incidences in which people do not have the final say in whether they are fine or not, and fainting abruptly onto a desk in a decent public middle school in Manchester, New Hampshire is one of them.
Sharing the mind of a pigeon is also one of them, but Amos only discovered this later in the day after a rigorous series of tests and several hours sitting beside a snack machine in the local emergency room.
He sipped at a can of fruit punch he had been given upon his arrival, munching on the straw idly with his front teeth and waiting for someone to come back and fetch him.
It took a while.
When the doctor did finally arrive, he was looking a bit harassed; he had a clipboard in his hands, and he was gripping it so tightly that the tips of his fingers were white. This was due in no small part to the fact that Amos's mother was trotting after the man at full speed. She was wearing her work outfit still, a brown cotton skirt suit, and carrying her 3-inch heels in one quivering hand. Her hair was incredibly windblown and she had a run in one of her pantyhose.
"I'm so, so sorry, honey, I left as soon as I could, but I got stuck in traffic, and... oh, look at you." She brushed his unruly hair away from the piece of gauze taped to his forehead and pulled him into a very tight hug; he held his fruit punch can out awkwardly with one arm and clung to her with the other.
"I'm fine, Mom," he repeated his mantra for the day. The doctor cleared his throat at this, and consulted his watch.
"Mrs. Freeman," he chanced after a quick glance at the keyboard.
"Ms. Baker," she corrected purposefully.
"Ms. Baker, if I could ask you and your son to step into the consultation room, please." He motioned to a very small room on his right which was papered with a floral pattern and contained a squishy half-couch and several boxes of facial tissue. It looked like it had been carefully designed as an inoffensive place in which to receive very bad news.
The person the doctor had been waiting on arrived a moment later; he was well-dressed, but the kind of well-dressed that people are when they want to relate to regular people without intimidating them. He had a patch on his sweater vest that read "HAMMEL INSTITUTE" underneath a logo he didn't recognize.
The man caught him looking and focused on Amos warmly. He smiled a smile that crinkled the corners of his eyes.
"It will just be a few moments," this new man assured them, and his mother made a point to look impolitely skeptical. The man didn't flinch. "I'm here to present your son... a very unique opportunity."
Amos noticed that the man hadn't said "offer."
Michelle Baker stood, alone, in the neatly paved driveway of her classy Manchester home, halfway inside the backseat of her neutrally colored four-door sedan that had received a very high safety rating from Consumer Reports. Her tweed blazer slid up to her waist, dragging her blouse along with it, as she rummaged around in her floorboard for the remainder of her groceries. She was cursing her ex-husband's name with too much fervor to care that the entire neighborhood could see her stretch marks.
It is well acknowledged that being a single mother of two teenage boys in this day and age is a difficult undertaking. Sure, she might also sell insurance for a living, but she was still a person, and besides, somebody had to do it. There were plenty of things so frightening that you would pay for protection from them. When her ex-husband sent her letters about his new, sickeningly prosperous family, she was one of them.
"Do you need help?" A tentative voice called out from behind her. The feet attached to said voice were some 15 yards away, but quickly closing the distance. Michelle whipped around dangerously, teetering on her tired, high-heel mangled feet.
"Oh, thank God, Amos." She dropped the bag of frozen broccoli she had been holding and tottered over to him, wrapping him in a tight, warm hug. "You're early."
"I took the bus," he murmured, patting her reservedly on the back. He was noticeably taller than his mother, even when she was in her work shoes; five-feet-eleven-inches at last count. He was also loaded down with three full bags of luggage. He rubbed the tip of his nose absentmindedly, then cleared his throat.
"Uh, I'll put my stuff in the foyer and come back."
It was 2010, and 15-year-old Amos Freeman returned to his mother's house for the first time since Christmas. It is possible that, somewhere else in the great city of Manchester, some other 15-year-old boy was helping his mother put away groceries. However, it is decidedly unlikely that they were having a similar conversation.
"Do you have any carrots?" Amos asked, peeking into the fridge and searching the crisper. "Or lettuce? Actually," he amended after coming across a packaged salad on the bottom shelf, "this is good. Can I have this?" He shook the salad to get his mother's wandering attention.
"Yes, and there's ranch in the fridge." His mother gave him a sweeping, up-and-down glance. "Why, have you been 'borrowing' rabbits again?"
"It's fascinating," Amos said defensively through a mouthful of raw vegetable. "It's like, you know, if you run really fast, the ground just becomes a big blur? But when you're a rabbit, you can just... see... everything. Every blade of grass, no matter how fast you're going."
His mother pondered this, then mentally counted off how many days of spring break her son had remaining.
"Are you going to see your father before you go back?" She asked in a deceptively normal tone of voice. Amos stopped chewing for a split second, then resumed cautiously.
"I don't know, I didn't know I was invited," he replied, his eyes on the particularly brittle way his mother was holding the glass she was now pouring soda into. "Why, did something happen?"
"He sent a letter in the mail inviting you and Joel to the twins' birthday party on Saturday."
"Oh."
"But not me."
"Oh."
There was an excruciating silence during which Amos did not know what to say and was afraid to put anything else in his mouth out of sheer respect for the heat of his mother's anger.
"How's Joel anyway?" He recovered quickly.
His mother sighed.
On average, Joel and Amos Freeman managed to get along only slightly worse than oil and water. It was the kind of relationship that only siblings could have; it might have been along the lines of 50% familial obligation, 30% love, and 20% pure, unadulterated hatred.
Of course, as previously mentioned, math was Amos’s worst subject. He might have underestimated on the hatred.
“Has anybody ever told you you’re one weird motherfucker?” Joel said randomly to his brother on an unseasonably warm Saturday in April. The two boys were sitting across from each other at a small, child-sized table, eating professionally baked cupcakes smothered in pink buttercream.
“Not in those exact words,” he mumbled, wiping some frosting off of his cheek and furrowing his brows irritably. “Although last month--”
“Don’t,” Joel cut him off, shaking his head minimally as though out of disbelief anyone could be so socially awkward. “Don’t start that shit you do. And you know what I mean. ‘I BORROWED the mind of a puppy last week and then it took a shit! It was FUCKING fantastic!’” His brother mimed his voice poorly, much to the disdain of some nearby parents. Amos picked at his cupcake wrapper and said nothing.
“You don’t eat meat, you won’t sleep like a fucking normal person, all you talk about is shit nobody cares about, and you go off to that freak school for the whole fucking year, and I still have to listen to Mom talk about how fucking great you are.”
The tables beside them were beginning to thin out. Amos closed his eyes and rolled them as far back into his head as he could manage.
“And she always tells us that story about that thing you had when you were born. The cowl, or call, or--”
“Caul,” supplied Amos in monotone, who had heard this rant more times than he had actually heard their mother tell the caul story.
“Whatever. Drives me fucking nuts,” Joel finished determinedly.
The younger boy surveyed his brother; they had the same dark hair, although Joel kept his tightly shaved. They had the same green eyes, although Joel’s were bloodshot and frequently narrowed in anger. They were of similar height, although Joel was stockier, and they even had similar complexions. Of course, Joel had covered a lot of his skin with permanent art. In spite of all this, it sometimes seemed to Amos like there were not only five years, but five galaxies, between them.
“Are you done?” He said shortly. “I’m going to go tell Rachael and Rebecca happy birthday.”
“Well, enjoy yourself,” was the sarcastic reply. “Weird motherfucker.”
Rachael and Rebecca Freeman were Joel and Amos’s half-sisters by Robert Freeman’s second wife, Rochelle. In private company, his mother sneered at the fact that all of their names began with the same letter while simultaneously ignoring the fact that she had named her own children after neighboring books of the Old Testament. ‘Isn’t that cute,’ she had mocked, cradling a homemade mojito in one hand.
‘Bastard.’
Like his new wife, Robert’s new children were golden-headed, bubbly, and a little difficult for Amos to stomach for more than thirty minutes at a time. He didn’t dislike the twins (or his step-mother, for that matter, although he would sooner die than confess that to his mother), but, as is often the case with family you don’t see very often, it usually consisted of a lot of awkward, stupid questions in a very short span of time.
It turned out that the twins had already left the scene of the party, accompanied by their mother and the majority of the guests, to congregate at a roller skating rink some five miles away.
“Amos!” His father said jovially, giving him the kind of clap on the back that is usually reserved for high-contact sports. “I’m glad you made it. Sorry you missed the girls; I’ll give them your love. Where’d Joel get to?” Amos swiveled and searched the table they had been previously occupying, only to notice an impressive plume of smoke rising from behind a particularly healthy bush with a smatter of blue flowers on.
“He’s smoking behind your hydrangeas.”
There was silence between them for a moment.
“Right. Well, how’s school?”
“It's good.”
“I don’t get to write you as often as I’d like,” his father said with a tone that was suddenly soft but serious. “I work a lot, and the girls obviously keep me busy, but I think about you a lot, Amos. Just keep me up to date with how things are going, alright? I feel like your mother hears from you twice as often. It won’t kill you to write to dear old Dad every now and then. Even an e-mail’s fine.” He paused, giving his son a pressing look with furrowed brows. “You’re a good kid. Stay out of trouble.”
Sometimes Amos was worried that his dorm bedroom was more comforting to him than his bedroom in Manchester. He wasn't entirely sure why this was a worry; he knew only that many students at Hammel suffered from chronic homesickness and general discontent, and he was not one of them. It was a disturbing duality for him: the reality he had grown up in, and the reality he had grown into.
Having a human mind was oftentimes incredibly inconvenient. Lots of animals had a better deal, in his opinion. Birds were his favorite.
For example, when Amos borrowed the mind of a bird, he could see ultraviolet, but he could not comprehend the future. All of the birds he had ever met had assured him (in a manner of speaking) that worrying about the future was unnecessary for their survival, and they were usually right. Birds did not bother with philosophy or regret. In fact, in direct opposition to modern human society, the only thing that really mattered to a bird was what color you were.
Amos, now seventeen, was still rather pale, with bags under his eyes and a smattering of freckles that had faded from lack of sun exposure and a very small white scar just above his right eyebrow. His nose was a bit pink because rubbing it was a habit. Borrowing for an extended length of time gave him sinus trouble and the symptoms of a rather mild, but near-perpetual, head cold.
Even when he wasn't feeling stuffy, he rubbed it anyway. It was just one of those things.
July had been a relatively good month for him so far. He had just finished combing through a sizable stack of letters, ripping them open, reading them, re-reading them. There was an update from his mother, who had recently found a new boyfriend. There was an update from his brother, who had recently found a new rehab facility.
There was no update from his father. There was, however, a letter from the University of Vermont Department of Admissions, who claimed to be very interested in him and, hint-hint-wink-wink, had a rather good Animal Behavior curriculum. He set it aside for further consideration.
Behind it was a free set of stickers from the strictly vegetarian animal rights foundation he donated to monthly out his allowance, mostly in secret.
There was also a flyer that he had been avoiding, which was for the local LGBT center's alternative prom.
When Amos was in kindergarten, his mother had been called to the school for a meeting about his unacceptable behavior. He still remembered very acutely the feeling of deep, burning shame associated with doing something you feel is appropriate and then being harshly scolded for it.
He had kissed one of his male classmates on the cheek during recess, and thinking about it made his ears turn pink; not because he was ashamed, but because he still fancied the idea.
Having a human mind was an unbearable bother.
It was possible, Amos conceded, that he truly was a weird motherfucker.
He left the mail where it sat on the desk, not bothering to organize it, and padded over to his bed in sock feet. He threw back all five comforters, snuggled between them, and pulled them up to his chin.
As an afterthought, he inhaled a couple of sprays of over-the-counter nasal steroids that he had picked up at the drugstore. He had long ago resigned himself to the fact that he was not meant to live a glamorous life.
His mind, like a well-greased component of an extraordinary machine, slipped out of his flesh and into the nearest bird.
Ultraviolet was Amos's favorite color, and the present was his favorite tense.Behind the M A S K . . .Name: Kelly
Age: Twenty
RP Experience: I've role played for many years, but only in tabletop or one on one settings. This is my first time role playing in a forum.
How did you find us?: RPG-DShow your S K I L L S . . .Cooking had never been Amos's strong suit, and as he had neither the time nor energy to dedicate to its practice, his prospects for finding a quick job via the local classified ads seemed rather dim.
He was leaning back precariously in his chair with a highlighter resting between thumb and forefinger, ready to mark anything that caught his interest.
He rubbed his nose and sniffed as quietly as he could out of respect for the hallowed library environment. He carefully rested all four legs of the chair back on the ground.
There was nothing. He should probably go around and ask in person; from what he'd heard, prospective employees were usually more well-received that way.
But with whom? His mother had always said that it was bad luck if you didn't take someone with you to stand outside and think wholesome thoughts about your success. Then again, his mother thought a lot of things were bad luck.
Nevertheless, he scanned the room a bit reservedly, craning his neck to examine the people near the back shelves. It wasn't that weird, he told himself. Surely one of them was interested in a part-time job, too, in which case they could help each other....
And if not, surely at least one of them was friendly.
He stood, rolling up the newspaper and tucking the highlighter into his pocket. He walked over to the nearest shelf, peeked behind it, and smiled a bit apologetically at the person there.
"Um," he whispered. "Sorry, but can I ask you a question?"
