Information

Apol
Legacy Name: Apol

The Chibi Experiment #404
Owner: nervous

Age: 5 years, 2 months, 1 week

Born: February 14th, 2019

Adopted: 3 years, 2 months, 3 weeks ago

Adopted: January 31st, 2021

Statistics

• Level: 10
   
• Strength: 13
   
• Defense: 12
   
• Speed: 8
   
• Health: 12
   
• HP: 12/12
   
• Intelligence: 100
   
• Books Read: 100
• Food Eaten: 0
• Job: Candy Sorter

I stared up at the building before me. It stood huge and foreboding against the gray, sooty sky of dusk. The summer air was humid and thick with promise. The building, once bustling with life, the building was now a skeleton of dilapidated bricks and broken glass.
I smiled to myself as I adjusted my backpack on my shoulders. There was a chain-link fence separating me from the great structure. It was funny to me that they thought that would stop me.
With a grunt, I hurdled over the fence, catching my footing on the other side with a crunch of broken glass under the heels of my boots.
I straightened myself and gazed at the wonder before me.
Dead Mall Paradise.




Liminal spaces, they're called. Or so I've heard.
Places once bustling with life and traffic that had been reduced to creaks and groans of the wind shuddering the barren walls of the abandoned building.
I loved Urban Exploring.
When I was small, my mother used to take me to the mall every Friday after school. We'd visit the shops, usually not buy anything, and eat at the food court. I loved the mall smells and sounds, people chatting, food cooking, cash registers opening and closing and the green, rich smell of dollar bills. The mall we frequented when I was little closed down after an economic recession. When we'd pass the mall on the way home from school after that, I felt empty and sad as I gazed out of the backseat window of my mom's Hatchback at the crumbling bricks and empty, cracked parking lot. It used to be so magical.
From diamonds to dust.
Ever since then, I had been fascinated with Dead Malls. Security wasn't super tight in most places, since if they couldn't afford to keep the malls open, they definitely couldn't afford to pay security to drive around the abandoned parking lots in hopes of spotting a vandal, or some silly teenagers with funny cigarettes' and spray paint.
I was always very respectful when I entered these places. They were relics of a lost civilization to me. I came to take pictures, admire the beauty of the breakdown, and be on my way.




I squeezed through the side door of the front entrance, since the door was hanging off the rusty hinges by a single nail. I could hear my mom's voice in my head saying, "Apol, you better be careful!"
Once inside, the humid summer air was replaced with a cold, stillness that surrounded me in a pleading way.
I gazed around me. Broken glass littered the floors of the store front windows that had been broken out through the iron rail shutters. I swung my flashlight around me. It was so still. There in front of me stood the remains of a stone fountain, once bursting with crystal blue water and foam now dried and empty, littered with old pennies so rusty they looked black.
There was an escalator at one point, but the rails had been torn out and the steps were covered with dirt and dust. It might have been white at one point, maybe even silver, but now it was brown. The ceilings were impossibly high, once overhead was a skylight that poured white magical light over the mall goers, but now was cracked and water damaged, spilling out only dust and empty summer blackness.




I shuffled forward, gazing around me as I went. I imagined what life was like in here when it was still open to the public. I closed my eyes and breathed in the dust and darkness, exhaling light and laughter. There were the Movies, the Food Court, the giant Carousel...
When I opened my eyes, my mother was beside me.
"Apol," she said warmly.
I fell into her arms, my flashlight falling limp at my side.
"You have to learn how to let these things go," she whispered as she pet my hair lovingly.
I pulled away from her. "I just wanted to visit. I wanted to remember what it was like when you were here..." My voice was small and pathetic.
My mother looked around. The haphazardly hung signs, torn at the bottoms, the broken store fronts, the soft cry of the wind rattling the concrete skeleton of the mall.
"You have your memories," she said matter-of-factly. "Those will always be yours."
When I opened my eyes again, she was gone.
"Always have to have the last word, huh?" I muttered, and pressed forward into the belly of the Dead Mall, eager to see what it had in store for me next.


Credits
profile template (c) helix (get it) bg
cinderella city images from the denver public library
edits, art, and story by nervous thanks to HallowsEve for letting me adopt!

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