The sky is clear, the forecast optimistic: nothing but blue skies through the weekend, with clouds rolling back in and the chance of rain increasing as the week goes on. Possible snow as a cold front rolls back in. A typical June in Colorado.
A few states over in the city that awaits her, few things ever change. Nightfall brings with it a reprieve from the heat, which Grace has learned from past experience is not enough to convince a certain Euthanatos acarya to wear short sleeves. That acarya may have something to do with her decision to make a physical location. There are more opportunities for her to interact with other Virtual Adepts, to meet more Mercurial Elite. Denver, it seems, was a place where people went to escape, to regain their balance, and to disappear again.
Those who do not know what they are running from have the most difficult time settling down.
--
Once inside, the weather does not matter one iota. The logistics team running the Denver International Airport has ensured that every aspect of operations is under tight control, from the spacing of tables around the fast food restaurants to how quickly the lines move through security to how long a plane will sit on the tarmac. As soon as fliers walk through the sliding doors, out of the shaky summer and into a brightly lit 65 degrees Fahrenheit, an LCD board greets them, displaying the status of every departure, every arrival, without making a sound. What sounds there are come through an overhead speaker, multiple variables altering the speech until it more closely resembles a voice bubbling up from the bottom of a lake.
The 10:15 DIA to LAX is boarding in an hour and a half. It is up to Grace whether she is on the morning flight or the evening. She knows her body and its willingness to function from one hour to the next.
Regardless of Earth's rotational position relative to the Sun, she is here. She is going through the ritual of producing her boarding pass - does she go through the self-checkout, or does she get in line to interact with the ticket clerk?
Grace
Denver's airport gives Grace the creeps, even in the middle of the day. For someone who wears a pendant inscribed with its coordinates, that might seem a little odd, but most airports don't have a demon horse outside beckoning travelers, and a demon bursting out of a suitcase inside -- just in case you happened to forget that the decorating team was obsessed with demons.
The other thing that gives her the creeps is going through security. There are two choices -- body scan, or hands getting all grabby everywhere. She opts for the pat-down every time. Those body scanners just scream Technocratic fuckery. They might be able to catch people smuggling explosives onto a plane, but they've probably also caught quite a few supernatural beings for the Techs to dissect. All the people in line would just see someone getting taken away for a more "thorough examination" to one of the TSA's special rooms, and never coming back. It'd probably even make them all feel much safer.
So, she grit her teeth and bore the gloved woman checking her pockets for contraband like a champ, all while wondering if this was truly worth it. Every time, it feels like breaking the Universe's laws is just so much easier than this.
Easier is rarely wiser.
That being said, there is not so much a problem with doing the self-checkout. The same data gets entered either way, after all. The boarding pass gets presented for machine eyes to read, and Grace's eyes go soft, thinking more about her destination than the here and now. It won't be long, and she'll be flying -- flying to a certain Euthanatos acarya who never wears short sleeves. To a warm state.
departure
The garbled voice persists as Grace interacts with the machine, attempting to get the attention of a party meeting someone whose name would only register with the person to whom it belongs. It is not Grace's name. Grace is departing, not arriving. Clusters of weary travelers mill around the baggage claim area. More than a few stand with balloons and handcrafted signs to welcome home servicemen returning from overseas. A child is keening somewhere in the echo chamber that is the lobby.
Her boarding pass tells her everything she needs to know. Her flight is boarding at Gate A28, so close to the main terminal that she could have arrived ten minutes before final call and probably been fine. Probably. There is always the threat of being detained going through the security line, sure, but Grace has more to fear from the NSA than from the TSA. Having a Reddit account is enough to land Sleepers on a government watch list, and that is among the least of her online offenses.
Alienation. Cutting oneself off from the rest of humanity due to a feeling of not belonging, of being different, of being in danger: all of this is a reasonable human response, as Michael would say, but she and the rest of their brethren are not strictly human. But then some would say Michael is operating on a different plane than even other Awakened. All Adepts are. They have to be able to grasp universal concepts, to rid themselves of barriers that would impede their mastery of a Sphere, their taking the place of the ones who abandoned Earth during the Ascension War.
In some way, Grace must want for her Avatar to test her. These tests do not come out of nowhere. The moving walkway en route to catch a flight isn't the most ideal place for it to happen, but the transition is subtle. One moment she's moving along, perhaps spacing out again, perhaps checking her phone. At some point she has to look up.
A man holding his daughter's hand, his hair in dreadlocks, hers in twin puffs contained by black hair bands, yellow balls on one side, purple on the other. First the father flickers like a television picture cutting out, then the daughter. A stutter, their laughing conversation cutting in and out, and then they remain that way: white noise. Behind her, two businessmen are having a loud discussion about someone of mutual acquiantance. The same thing happens to them. Interference, then static. And then the gaggle of teenagers, wearing pajama pants and track t-shirts, the girls' hair sloppy and the boys wearing caps over their heads, half of them carrying pillows, two beleaguered chaperones coming up behind them.
It is like a rolling blackout, moving from one group to the next.
Grace
She is, indeed, looking up from her phone when she sees it. Time seems to go slower when we're shocked out of normality and into fight-or-flight what-the-fuck mode. Maybe that's one reason why we tend to freeze up -- everything else is frozen too. Grace doesn't freeze, though. She just tenses her jaw, looks down to see if she too is dispersing into static, and then back up again to witness the wave of weirdness.
Crowds are hard for humans to understand. We evolved from ancestors who never knew more than about thirty individuals for their entire lives. That tribal structure no longer fits, but it persists. The brain has a hard time grasping that a mass of people are just that -- people. It tends to render crowds as forest. A person's only a person in a crowd when you make a mistake -- you run into them, or mistake them for someone else -- breaking the illusion that they aren't really there. Grace hadn't even registered the people around her until they started to blink out. Strange, how they only began to be real in her mind just before they weren't anymore.
"Shit."
She reaches out, trying to touch the place where the father once was. Maybe he's still there. Maybe this is just her eyes playing tricks -- or somebody making her eyes play tricks. It's better than the thought that this plague of snow-crashed people will just keep claiming more -- will leave her in some solipsistic nightmare.
"Are you... okay?" she says, to the fuzz of white noise.
departure
Though they appear as though they are becoming insubstantial, the people around her are no more so than the television that is experiencing signal interception.
Through the white noise, everyone is continuing on doing what they were doing before this happened. Ghosts, almost. But not quite. They are very much still alive.
When Grace reaches out to touch the father's shoulder, he briefly flickers back into focus, as if she had wiggled the rabbit ears on an old motel television. As soon as she takes her hand away, in comes the snow again. But she can feel the fabric of his polo shirt, the thin muscle wired across hard bone. The warmth of him.
He does turn to acknowledge her. She cannot hear what he's saying, for it is just as garbled as the voice over the terminal speakers. The man is not used to people asking him that. For all she knows, he is telling her to mind her own business. More likely he is smiling uncertainly, assuring her he's fine, thanks, while his daughter tugs on his hand, come on Daddy come on we're going to miss the plane.
At the end of the moving walkway, the effect has taken over everyone. The food service workers, the kiosk staff, the porters and the airline staff and the security guards. Everyone except for Grace.
And an individual, androgynous to the point of near featurelessness, standing 50 meters in the direction she needs to go.
Grace
She can't hear the man, but his reaction calms her enough for her to pretend that she did, with a twitch of a smile, and a step back into her personal space. It's a comfort to catch on to the idea that she doesn't have to fix every person in the airport -- just one.
The moving sidewalk ends, so she steps off of it, and notices the one other solid person in the place. It's like a quest objective in a game almost, right? The one that stands out, you must not ignore. She doesn't bother going off to search for Easter eggs -- just walks right up.
"Hello," she says, breaking eye contact to gesture around at the bizarre ghosts of television static. "Are you seeing this? Are you doing this?"
There is the off chance that this is the second person to whom she's just said something mildly unhinged. Somehow, that doesn't seem quite as likely in this case.
departure
Everyone else continues on their way, though the din of hundreds of conversations muddling together is even more impossible to decipher when the thin fuzz of static stretches over everything, like a membrane between their reality and hers. The question she asks about the happening is not unhinged, if asked of the right person.
But she isn't speaking to a person at all, so the point is moot.
As she draws closer, Grace may become aware of the fact that the figure's facial features are uncomfortably symmetrical, perfect to the point of inhumanness. The aesthetic would enthrall a Cultist, frighten a Chorister. Probably make a Euthanatos believe they were in the presence of a Nephandus. But the entity does not feel malevolent. When it opens its mouth, its voice has a low tone and another, higher, almost echoing tone atop it.
Shifting, one might call it.
"This?" Though it neither smirks nor quirks a brow, Grace can hear the lilt in its speech. "Tell me what you're seeing."
Grace
Grace blinks. "Uh..." she twists her head, looking at the static. "You. You're still clear. Everyone else is coming through like they're on a broken TV set."
Except when she touches them. She fidgets with her hands as she gazes out across the room packed with people, all blobs of noise.
Her gaze pins down the entity again, and she continues: "Who are you?"
departure
"Who am I?"
Again with the impression of laughter that does not give way to it. The laughter of a being beyond time or space, who has known sentience since the first shards of light burst through the Milky Way but never corporeality. That's what the Awakened is for. That is what some of them think, anyway: that Ascension is really just the body dissolving and the Avatar fulfilling its true purpose.
Speaking of purposes:
"If I am clear, you would not have to ask." A beat. "Although, perhaps, you have to ask because I have not been clear in the past. Does this trouble you?"
Grace
She squints at the thing, shakes her head slightly. That response answered approximately nothing.
"Yeah, okay, in terms of making sense, you're about as clear as mud and just as solid. But at least you're present. Everyone else is... filtered out or something."
She scratches an ear and closes her eyes, but the hissing sound of randomness continues as a reminder.
"And yes, it troubles me," she says, a little irritation entering her voice. "Why wouldn't it trouble me?"
departure
"People trouble you, do they not?"
A just entity would allow her time to answer. Or a fair one. But this entity, even if just or fair, is also impatient. It wants something from her. Her attention, it has. Her curiosity, also. Yet it isn't satisfied.
Thus far, her Seekings have been fairly straightforward. Her Avatar has come to her filtered through the lens of a reality she knows rather than as it truly is. It is not in the nature of the Questing Avatar to be forthright. Those responsible for one find themselves imbued with a strong sense of purpose, a singular task they must complete before they move on to the next.
Not every situation they encounter is a side quest, however.
"Is that not why you avoid them?"
Grace
"So, the answer is to filter them out? Completely avoid them?"
She shakes her head. "No. I don't want to be alone."
Her eyes open again, determined. With what little this being has said to her, she's beginning to put things together. It seems familiar somehow, and it is familiar with her in turn. Talking to it isn't like speaking to a stranger.
"Troubles are good sometimes. I wouldn't have learned quite so much about... everything if there weren't trouble around literally every corner. The real problem is when they overcome you."
departure
"And yet, are you not overcome when you stand down? When you remove yourself entirely?"
The topic is swinging back around to people. If she gets the sense that the people in question are other Awakened...
Grace
"Yes. I'll admit that," she says, with a sigh. Her eyes start to dart elsewhere, at nothing in particular. At the static where a person used to be. At the sky.
"If I could just understand them, I wouldn't feel like I have to. Hell, if they could just understand me. But no. I get that this is my lack.
"You run into one incomprehensible person, that's them. But if nearly everyone in the world is--" she says, gestures around to the unintelligible mass "-- then that's on you."
departure
"Hmm."
That thoughtful noise says more, perhaps, than an entire sentence would. Grace could unpack plenty from that two-toned voice, if the point of conversing with another person, even if that person is not a person at all but a shard of energy given form.Grace
'Keep trying' seems like an unacceptable answer. Do, or do not. There is no try. So, she takes a moment to think back through her past, to times when the connection between herself and others was even worse. What actually helped?
Computers did. Like training wheels, providing an interface in between herself and others -- and nobody could judge her for not reading the hidden meaning or the body language or whatever else. If she wanted to run, she could turn the thing off. And she did -- a lot, at first. But it was the online time that helped.
"I guess... I'll never understand anybody if I run away from them whenever I can't fathom them. I'll have to stop that."
departure
So the entity watches her, the droning of humanity persisting on around them - around Grace - like the beginning of a wicked Quiet episode. Disconnection and delusions. None of this is actually happening, and yet hasn't she assured one of her associates of the mind parsing reality, that everything technically occurs inside one's head all the time anyway.
This is a dream world. It feels very real, but the only reality within it is what she has brought in with her. Her hopes and her fears.
At the phrase I guess, a minute shake of the head.
"Is that what you want?"
And like that, the lights cut out. From within the droning comes a commotion of panic. All the solid ghosts stop moving. They don't know what else to do.
Grace
Yeah, Grace. You didn't expect that little conversation to be the end of it, did you? Still.
"Shit."
She fishes her cell phone out of her laptop bag, with the intent of using it as a flashlight -- but no. It won't turn on. It's like all the light has been sucked out of this place. It's not going to be that easy. She slides it into her jeans pocket and begins reaching out with bare hands...
Sensory deprivation is supposed to be a lot more calming than this.
departure
In a situation like this back in the Real World™, order would come out of the loss of power. A generator would have already kicked on, or would have been on the entire time, and the backup lights would have come on after a moment of uncertainty. Someone would come on over the PA and the gate agents would take control of their people.
If anything like that happens, it is happening to the people who are not coming through because of the static. Someone does activate the overhead PA, but Grace cannot make out what the person on the other end is saying.
It does, however, sound a bit like her mother, if she really stops to think about it.
So: no light. Not even from the windows overlooking the runway, which had been letting in natural light when Grace began this whole checking in affair.
Grace
'The entity' is probably not there anymore. Was it ever? Even still, she's fairly sure it still watches. Why wouldn't someone want to watch as their pawn wanders around blindly in the dark? That's half the fun.
So, she moves, hands first, toward whatever staticky sound seems closest. Maybe she can produce the same effect as last time when she comes in contact with somebody -- make them visible at least?
"Can anybody hear me?" she asks, to the darkness.
departure
The darkness, at least, does not answer her.
As she gropes her way in search of another person, she might have expected her eyes to start adjusting to the low light. Aside from the flickering of the static cloaking the forms that seemed to be people earlier, nothing comes close to qualifying as 'light.'
What she finds in the darkness certainly feels as though it belongs to a person. The arm she brushes is solid, underneath the static and whatever clothes it wears, and warm.
It also turns towards her - she can feel attention on her that was not there before - and grabs her by the wrist. A feminine grip, by the size of the hand itself and the composition of the bones, the skin. Yet there is malice behind it.
Grace
The person she finds, it seems, is not keen on being bumped into in the dark. Maybe she's just startled or not otherwise looking for a fight. Grace puts her other hand on top of the one on her wrist -- not to wrench it off, but as a calming gesture. There there.
"I can't see. Can you?"
Maybe they can't hear her either, but it's worth a shot.
departure
Whoever it is cannot, in fact, hear her.
That calming gesture may or may not have an effect on the person. Grace cannot read their face, their posture, anything about them that might serve as a social cue. If the question makes it through the static and comes out sensical on the other side, she has no way of knowing that, either.
Point is, she takes the shot. The person, whoever they are, wrenches back hard to extricate their own wrist, and the glitching response does not trigger an affirmative or a negative. It is a response. Or maybe it isn't.
A thin stream of blue light begins to glow from beneath a closed door some distance away, then around its sides. A portent of its opening. The droning persists.
Grace
All right. Check that particular static person off. Grace sighs, wondering what to try next, when she sees the literal light. A door, opening. It's best not to ignore that kind of thing, and so she heads in the direction of it.
"What's behind Door Number One?" she mutters to herself.
Grace
[WP!]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 8, 8, 10, 10, 10) ( success x 5 )
departure
As she makes her way over to the awakening door, Grace can see no discernible change in either her surroundings or in the people still milling about, reacting to whatever threat the darkness bred. Skewed perspective. She is not seeing them, nor is she seeing what lies under the absence of light. What she sees is a door, a way out if not a way through.
Fingertips brush the air between her shoulder blades, almost reaching out to touch her but not quite managing. If she turns to examine the cause of the almost-touch, she sees nothing has changed. She cannot tell if the woman - woman? - who had grabbed her made another attempt or if this is someone else.
But the door does yawn open. Stretching some distance, curving at an awkward angle, the corridor offers no hints as to what lies beyond.
So soon as she has made her decision to investigate, the corridor draws her forward. If she had the choice to turn back, or stay, that choice is now forfeit.
The last thing she hears before she hears nothing else is her mother's voice:
Stop that, Grace.
And the door slams shut behind her, leaving her in a darkness even more absolute than the one she just left. For a moment it feels as if she has gone weightless. As if the next sensation she should expect is a plummet, and a crash.
---
No crash comes.
Her feet touch the ground, and she is still in possession of her faculties. She has not yet been punted back to the meatspace. That absolute darkness gives way to light again, and she finds herself back in the main terminal of the airport, boarding pass in hand, everything back the way it was.
Grace
A scream feels like it wants to escape as she plummets toward whatever, but Grace doesn't let it. And then? Well, at least it's a soft landing. The first thing she does upon being punted back to reality is to reach up and rub her eyes, half expecting to open them again to darkness. Darkness doesn't come.
That must have been the wrong choice -- to turn away from a person toward a door? To run to an exit? "Fuck," she says, under her breath, at her boarding pass.
At least this time, she heads to stand in line -- to a person to check her pass instead of the machine. It might do to get some practice at peopleing in.
departure
With the exception of her decision to interact with an actual human being this time, every other detail about the terminal and the people inside the terminal remains the same. As if a tape rewound, or she dropped into a transposed reality running along a fixed trajectory that only changed if she did something to change it.
There will be time to contemplate the physics of dreamscapes later, how much of it is stable and how much of it is impacted by internal decisions.
The line moves smoothly and quickly, the airline representative assigning check bag tickets and final boarding passes as if she could do so in her sleep. Towards the gate, towards security, and the woman sitting behind the podium waving people forward with a gloved hand gives Grace a once-over, taking in her outfit and her single laptop bag and her general demeanor before making a beckoning motion for her to hand over her pass.
Security processes her just as before, a child a few machines over making a game out of not holding his mother's hand as they walk through the metal detector together, only this time one of the TSA agents decides to chit chat as she's waiting for her turn to go through.
"So where you off to?" the agent, a rail-thin young man with cow-licked blond hair, asks.
Grace
This time, Grace pays more attention to the forest. The trees become people, if only while she can still see them. She actually missed other people when they were filtered out, after all.
So, she smiles at them. Especially, at the child doing child-things, playing with disobedience.
It's strange, how calm she can be after having just gone through a horrifying waking dream, but hey -- it wasn't so bad, was it? A chiding. A warning. Her mother's voice was about the worst of it.
Some other voice now, with a question...
"Oh, um. I'm going to L.A. How about you?"
Yeah, TSA agent. Where are you headed?
departure
It would not be impossible to take everything in, Grace being capable of heightening her senses and treating her brain more like a computer processor than like a barely-understood network of synapses and neurochemicals, yet without doing so this place is teeming with conversations and activities.
The small child is the source of a good deal of amusement in the immediate vicinity, even if the mother is wearing an expression of threadbare patience.
How about you?
Though the TSA agent laughs, he does so wryly, like they're both in on the joke. Of course he isn't going anywhere. This job is a dead end for him. On the other side of the X-ray machine, his much larger and more sedentary coworker is twirling a pen through his fingers and taking his sweet time moving parcels down the conveyor belt.
Overhead, the automated voice on the PA system reminds travelers to keep an eye on their surroundings and support any suspicious activity or unaccompanied luggage to TSA.
In the area beyond the checkpoint, where chairs are half occupied by fliers lacing up their shoes or waiting for their companions, a young woman with bright eye makeup and an impatient expression on her face asks the cellphone plastered to her ear, "I don't know what to do anymore, it's like he doesn't have any, like, goals or anything, we're graduating next year and he won't even--"
Grace's bag rolls out of the X-ray machine. The skinny cow-licked TSA agent has to take the person behind her aside to wave a wand over them. Everything continues on as it did before.
It's happening again. This time there's no static: the volume begins to drop. All of the conversations, all of the electronic and mechanical sounds, the din of thousands of people getting to where they need to go. By the time Grace reaches the moving walkway, it is as if someone has clapped noise-cancelling headphones over her ears.
She can hear the sound of her own breathing. Nothing else.
Grace
We're all going somewhere, even the TSA agent, and she tells him as much. Says to enjoy the journey, though society's rules say they can't stay and chit-chat without his journey being to a pink slip.
She rolls her eyes at the PA system, seeing as how she is a walking suspicious activity.
That's about when the noise of the airport muffles. Grace glares at the moving walkway. It must be cursed. Next time (will there be a next time?) she'll take the non-moving walkway. Less cursed.
The people. This time, don't run away, right? Easy. So, who's here?
departure
The moving walkway keeps right on doing what it was doing before, just as the other people in the airport keep right on doing what they were doing before. Everything is carrying on as normal.
'Normal.' There's a word that defies definition.
In looking around, Grace can see behind her what she may have missed before: the two businessmen laughing, or at least baring their teeth and throwing their heads back slightly, their joke even more private now than it was before. The flock of teenagers, in dead silence, have become a solemn procession rather than a sleep-deprived yet hyperactive group for their chaperones to keep track of.
Two ladies at the newsstand are having what appears to be a grave conversation, one of them holding her uniformed elbows tight to her torso while the other nods and worries her ID badge.
At the point that she became distracted by the white noise last time, a young man wearing a backwards cap goes flying down the lane between the moving walkways, able to move at such a quick clip because his sneakers have rollerskate wheels in them. He carries nothing with him, and once he's assured of the clearness of his path he holds his hands behind his back and continues on.
Grace cannot hear his wheels, cannot hear the whispering of the walkway as it bears her steadily towards her gate.
A Deaf couple stands as far out of the way of traffic as they can, arguing, the female of the pair asking the same question twice in a row, more emphatically the second time: Does it matter?
Grace
If there's anybody here who might be able to empathize with Grace right now, it might be the deaf couple. She tries to remember the alphabet of sign language from way back in grade school -- just a few letters come instantly to mind.
But she approaches anyway, trying to appear mildly worried. She points to her ear and shakes her head.
"Excuse me, but I seem to have suddenly lost my hearing," she says, out loud. Maybe they're good lip readers too?
departure
Although the male of the pair is in the midst of firing back a response, their peripheral vision and situational awareness is perhaps higher than the average individual's. It isn't extrasensory, and they are at a bit of a disadvantage because they are arguing with each other, but the woman appears to be looking for an excuse to disengage from her partner anyway, and it is with a firm set to her teeth and an air of tempered dismissal that she turns from her person to see what Grace wants.
The man, a tall and gangling redhead, wears a blue t-shirt underneath an unbuttoned flannel and carries a laptop case himself. He could use a haircut and a new pair of shoes, but he seems otherwise put together. The woman is nearly a foot shorter than he is, wearing red skinny jeans and a black peasant blouse, her green-dyed hair up in a topknot that reveals her blond roots. They both appear to be in their twenties.
So she's pointing to her ear and shaking her head. The woman blows out a breath to calm herself and looks over at the man, who frowns at the woman and speaks. He does not seem to immediately grasp what the problem is, so the woman smacks him with the back of her hand and goes rooting through his laptop case until she finds a small notepad and a pen. She uses his back to write out a message before handing it off to Grace.
ARE YOU OK
Grace
Losing your hearing at the airport should be just awful, and for a regular person, it would be. Grace, however, just seems to accept this turn of events as rather par for the course.
In fact, it's a little better than the last time she did this. At least she can see people now. Communication can be had, as evidenced by the pen and paper messaging system.
She reads, and ponders that question. Answers with a shrug, but takes the pen to write out (on the poor man-turned-writing-desk) "I DON'T KNOW".
Before she gives the pen back over, she adds: "NICE HAIR".
departure
Both of them read the response together. Though the man appears to laugh the sort of laugh one looses when one does not know how else to react, the woman frowns and reaches up to toy with a bit of green hair that has popped free from its restraint. A nervous habit. Then she signs THANK YOU? as if she isn't sure that's the correct thing to say.
A surge of activity further down the concourse as, it would appear, another flight has arrived and passengers disembark from the plane.
After a moment of silent conference, the woman writes:
YOU NEED HELP TO FIND YOUR GATE?
Grace
In truth, Grace could probably find it on her own by reading signs, but something says that would be the wrong choice. The airport would morph into a maze or everyone would turn into an airplane or something terrifically dire, even though it doesn't seem to be terribly dream-like right now. Everything can change in an instant.
So, she nods in response, and pulls out her documentation. Points out the gate. A28.
And, while they're figuring out what to do with their new charge, she takes the pen again, kneels down to the floor to write.
"T
Grace
[Er. THANK YOU]
departure
[JAMIE IS GOING TO WRITE A SUPER AWESOME WRAP-UP POST TMRW CURSE YOU CIRCADIAN RHYTHM]
