Information

Noir has a minion!

Adelaide Noir the Brokenhearted Kitty

Noir

The

Glacier Legeica
Owner:

Age: 6 years, 6 months

Born: November 21st, 2006

Adopted: 6 years, 6 months ago (Legacy)

Adopted: November 21st, 2006 (Legacy)

Pet Spotlight Winner
December 10th, 2011

Statistics

Level: 42
Strength: 106
Defense: 103
Speed: 13
Health: 16
HP: 16/16
Intelligence: 3
Books Read: 3
Food Eaten: 0
Job: Unemployed

Once in a while, at night, he thought he heard cars.

It would wake him out of a dead sleep, that old, familiar noise. Didn't make much sense to him. Quentin Noir was sharper than that, he knew. It was undoubtedly some minor psychological desperation, an animal part of him unable to adapt to his new life. It was nothing he couldn't overlook.

That didn't change the fact it would wake him out of a dead sleep, fully alert, heart soaring for some long seconds. He would look around, trying to find the honk or the rumbling tires. Maybe this was all a bad dream. Maybe someone had come to rescue him.

And, always, he would only find the insides of the gutted building he'd fallen asleep in, or the rusty interior of a bus with its nose buried inside another car. The worst shock had been when he woke up to find a bloated, blood-soaked corpse had fallen from its propped-up position to stare him in the face during the night. Noir made sure to clear the bodies out of anywhere he slept after that night.

It was troublesome, sometimes, because there were just ... just so many bodies.

He thought he'd seen his share of death when he was a detective. This wasn't fair.

During the day they would wander, him and that insane pianist. He really didn't know Baltimore Hanson anymore. He would muse over this as he watched the man rummage through trash and corpses for some forgotten granola bar still sitting good-as-new in a purse, or chapstick for his radiation-burned lips. He acted like an animal, Noir sometimes thought. He was an animal, Noir thought more often, and he looked all the more the part with those horrible gas masks and thick clothes they had to wear whenever they ventured into the cities closest to where the second Chernobyl went down.

Noir liked to push his boundaries. He found a spiked dog collar amid the rubble of a Wal-Mart they were sifting through, once, and a long length of heavy chain. Baltimore ignored him when he fastened them around his neck. Small pleasures.

He had seen Baltimore slice a man's face open for looking at him wrong, with those horrible iron nails he had driven into the tips of his own fingers at the height of his madness. Noir had tried to remove them from his hands, those beautiful hands that had once made such heartbreaking music, and had bite-scars running down his neck for his trouble now.

Baltimore had gone insane, more crazy than he had been before the world ended. Every artist is a little bit mad, but Baltimore took the cake anymore. It was a rare day he acknowledged Noir with more than a word or two. Noir thought the aching loneliness he himself now felt, with the only friend he had ever thought he had, was a poetic punishment for how he had once treated Baltimore.

Noir was not a good person. Perhaps the end of the world had happened to punish him.

♪ Every Me, Every You - Placebo
♪ Hello Alone - Anberlin
♪ Pet - A Perfect Circle

Graphics, art, coding, character and writing by Corgi.
Car CI by Arbor.
Profile quote from The Hollow Men, by T. S. Eliot.
Source background image.

Day 1: Snow today. Head hurts. Can't stop sneezing and my ears are ringing. Extremely annoyed. Going to have a "chat" with Bella about the dust problem. I'm beginning to think she's not much of a maid no matter what her credentials say. The fighting that's been brewing to the east apparently got worse this morning.

Day 3: Head still hurts. I don't know what's going on; the maid's been working double time, but it still isn't enough, useless woman. I believe I'm developing a fever and I shall be very upset if that is the case. No news on the rebellion ... I'm worried about Adelaide. My sister was always so headstrong and vocal and I don't like that Kurucz she finds so wise. She laughs at me when I say he reminds me of Hitler. He's handsomely charismatic, and that's exactly what I don't like about him.

Day 10: Planes overhead. It's snowing.

Day 13: I heard bombing in the distance last night. Bella followed me around the mansion all day like a lost puppy, asking for a few weeks' leave to go see her family, as they're closer to the fighting than us. I have no doubt I will never see her again, but I let her go.

I wonder what Baltimore is doing.

Day 14: I wrote about that loveer Balti in this last night and now he won't get out of my head. I never met someone I liked so much as Baltimore Hanson. He is a pianist and absolutely certifiable. That's no hyperbole; he has recurring amnesia--forgets 90% of his life every couple of years or months, from some brain trauma he had as a kid--and absolutely no connection with anything real. boy doesn't care about anybody. He should probably be locked up. Maybe that's where he is now. He'd be safer there, and happy too as long as they supplied him with a piano.

We had a ... falling out, after he had another memory relapse, but I like to think we were friends.

Day 28: More snow. Biggest snowstorm the country's ever seen, with roaring winds. It isn't melting, either. Air smells funny. Can't stop thinking about Baltimore now that I've let the butthead back into my mind. Saw Kurucz on TV today, giving some rousing speech about true liberty.

Day 30: Snow. Planes. I'm getting nervous and I don't know why. I'm never nervous. A private detective is not allowed to be nervous. My headache has not gone away at all.

Day 43: I just realized Adelaide hasn't called in over a month. The TV says the fighting is getting worse.

Day 55: Explosion over in Riyatte. They say it's another Chernobyl. I'm getting out of here.

Day 60: More snow.

Day 62: I'm alive. I shouldn't be alive. My taxi driver just started coughing up bloody phlegm and then there was a horrible noise. We collided with a semi and the truck driver's dead too I shouldnt be alive

Day 69 70 71: There's no one. I checked every car I saw between here and Mars City. Everyone was dead and covered in blood. My head still hurts. I found a handheld radio in one of the cars and some new batteries--and food. I took them. The dead don't eat. I thought about trying to take one of the autos and driving the rest of the way, but I couldn't bring myself to drag a corpse out of the driver's seat.

Day 73: I walked the whole way to Mars City and I have frostbite. I'm afraid I'm going to lose fingers. I can barely write. It's so cold. Thank God Adelaide made me get this heavy coat. The air still smells strange.

There wasn't anyone in Mars City. Just more crashed cars.

This is where I left Baltimore. I didn't even realize that when I headed this way.

Day 80: I feel more collected now. My headache is starting to get better but that's a small boon compared to what I've found out.

I managed to get the radio working and picked up a few stations. From what I can gather, they ... the rebels poisoned the snow. They're calling it a superplague. It backfired and now the rebels are all dead, too. Kurucz turned himself in but died before they even got him in a courtroom. They don't even know what the survival rate is, they're just saying death, death everywhere.

I also heard they're rounding up the rebel supporters. Adelaide is an idiot.

Day 81: I went for a walk. There was nothing living. Nothing. Where are they? There has to be someone else alive in this city. Mars had fifty thousand people living in it for God's sake.

Day 90: Found someone today. There are other people here. They ... I don't want to talk about it. I don't want anything to do with them. I don't want to see any more death.

I want to go home.

Day who cares: My last entry was overly vague. I will elaborate: there's a group here calling themselves the "Chosen," the people the superplague passed over. It's a disgusting circlejerk mob-religion in the making. Maybe fifty people. I do not even want to describe their activities. It's only been something like a month since the world went to hell and they're already doing horrible things.

They want me to join them. It makes it worse that I see myself in their leader, a singularly unsavory man named Diego.

Day XX: The radio was droning and I think Adelaide might be alive. They said something about resistences to the superplague running in the family.

Day XX: More pressure from the Chosen every day. I don't know how much longer I can do this.

Day XX: this whole thing is a joke, right? I feel sick

Day: this isn't fair i'm hungry I feel sick when am I going to wake up? I need to wake up this can't be real its a nightmare. i'm not really sitting in the corner of a dead man's bedroom in a dead man's house and listening to a lynch mob outside im going to wake up love love she was only fifteen it's not her fault her dad was in the military

Day XX: BALTIMORE. I MISS BALTIMORE

Day XXX:

Day 108, I believe.: It has become ... abundantly clear to me, given the unseemly emotional breakdown these prior entries are betraying, that I need to leave Mars City at once. The Chosen are becoming more violent every day. I've been exploring when I can, and I think I found a car with some gas to spare that they've missed in their sweeps. This is huge--from what the Chosen have said most cars were grabbed up at once once everything went to hell. Hotwiring isn't a kind of knowledge I honestly expected to ever come in handy, being a private detective, but I suppose it's the unexpected that has kept me alive thus far. Dead drivers or not, I have to get out. Also managed to find gas masks and a gun in one of the houses. I am not so deluded or naive to think I will not have need of it in the future.

They are having another one of their barbaric "revivals" in two days' time. They do some kind of horrible process of elimination ritual that singles out the "unworthy." I will try and escape then, when everyone is working themselves up into a murderous frenzy.

There is just one thing I need to do first.

Day 109: I found him. Looking at him kills every inch of me. My head hurts too badly to write clearly at the moment.

Day 109 (later): Now that my migraine has passed again I can go into more detail on my last entry: I found Baltimore. He not only survived the plague, he seems to have gone completely undetected by the Chosen. He was still living in his own goshdarn fire-gutted flat, the one I got him situated in, like nothing ever happened at all.

...he is like nothing I've ever seen. He was eccentric and detached when we met, but now I don't even know who he is. He doesn't talk, he barely does more than sit and stare at nothing.

He did ... something to his hands. Those beautiful hands that played such beautiful music--he mutilated them. He mutilated his own loveing hands and I can't stop feeling like it's my fault.

He said something that made sense at the time, when I broke into his old flat to look for him, but now that I think about it, it doesn't add up at all. (In my defense the boy attacked me and I was busy trying not to die.) "I never forgot you." Baltimore knows he gets recurring amnesia, and the last time I saw him he didn't remember who I was. I don't understand ...

Well. I managed to sneak him to the abandoned hotel I'm staying in without the Chosen finding us. He won't speak to me and he's covered in soot.

Oh, I looked around his apartment before we left and found a huge iron lockbox hidden in a closet. I suppose it was fireproof, as it was full of his Moleskine journals, the ones he was constantly writing in back when I knew him. I grabbed one without really thinking--maybe it can tell me what happened to him.

Day 110: Cleaned Balti up and got a good look at him. It's horrible. He somehow put nails up through the tips of his fingers so the sharp ends stick out like claws. He will never play the piano again (not that it matters in an apocalypse, I suppose). I tried to get him to let me take them out but he--he bit me. He actually went for my throat. This isn't my Baltimore. I thought his eyes couldn't get any deader when I knew him before.

I guess it ... doesn't matter. I'm glad to have someone I know with me again, even if he hates me.

I took a glance at the journal. It's ... not something I was meant to read.

Day 113: This is the first chance I've gotten to write since we escaped. I'm not sure how we did it.

Everything backfired. Baltimore knocked over a garbage can as we were going and some inquisitive ass must have heard it and tailed us. We almost got to the car when the whole vicious herd showed up, screaming about how we were going to ruin everything. I wrote earlier about them lynching a child because her father was in the military; they're absolutely terrified of government and anything related to it. They didn't want to let anyone leave because they think authority will discover them if they do.

Diego was the slyest of them all and I could easily see how he became the leader. He approached us with flattery and dignity at first, and gave Baltimore the warmest welcome that was ever wasted on a shattered mind. When that didn't work, he tried bribery. When I said no, he put a gun to Baltimore's head.

No one expected what happened after that. Baltimore made a sound that I can only describe as one a tortured cat would make the minute Diego got too close, and the next thing I knew they were both on the ground screaming. Diego kept firing the gun into the air and trying to hit Balti with it, and Baltimore just ... there was so much blood. He clawed Diego's eyes out.

The mob looked like it didn't know what to do. I couldn't bring myself to get near them, but Baltimore stopped on his own, when Diego realized what he'd done to him and just started cursing and howling. Baltimore didn't make a sound, he just came back and stood next to me like everything was fine.

It was over just like that. No one tried to stop us as I guided Baltimore to the car, and we drove away. The interior still smells like blood.

I don't really know what else to do now. I just wanted to get out of Mars so badly I didn't think ahead, much less plan for Baltimore being here. We're going down the road as I write ... to my shock Balti insisted on driving, and I admit, I was too afraid to say no. I hope he doesn't send us over the edge of a cliff.

...Adelaide. I suppose I will try to find Adelaide. Last I heard she was staying in Rusdale, where the rebel HQ was forming.

She really was such a sweet girl. For her sake I hope she's dead.