Chapter 1
Alex’s house
6:00, October 12, 2013
Alex
Morning Routine (Intro)
“All who walk the land will rot.
All who breathe the air will decay.
All who think shall become one with hatred.
But this is all intended. All is as planned.
-Book of Infection, 1”
-Text from an imaginary holy book crudely scrawled on a bathroom stall door.
Your name is Alex Renna. Alexis really, but you prefer to go by Alex. You’re still fast asleep in your bed, dreaming about something unimportant for the time being. So while you adventure through dreamscape, you need to be defined in appearance and personality. You’re a 24 year old with extremely pale skin; you prefer not to leave the house much. Your dark red hair is arranged in a sort of ponytail with some of the strands falling onto your face. The irises of your eyes are a blend of slate gray and blue. Your body isn’t very muscular, having had next to no interest in any sports or athletics when you were young. You aren’t overweight either, as, like with sports, you didn’t care much for food, sometimes skipping breakfast and almost never eating lunch. That doesn’t happen anymore; you eat a healthy amount of food now. You have slightly calloused hands, but they’re not from doing any physically exhausting work. You work as a videogame programmer, which you could say is exhausting, but programming is more mentally so. Unfortunately, your short attention span has left you incapable of finishing most of the projects you take up, with you getting bored and abandoning the project midway to sit on your desktop like a dead, half-grown tree in the middle of a dry desert. You manage to get some of your works done, and some of them have a bit of fame to them. Unfortunately, most of the works in your name seem restricted to the hipster crowd. You went to school and finished college, or at least as much as you wanted to take, so you can say that you’re a member of the intelligent folk. You’ve gathered multiple scratches, cuts, and scrapes on your skin, mainly around your shoulders, elbows, and knees, but you have absolutely no idea what caused them or when you got them.
*BEEEEEEEEP* *BEEEEEEEEP* *BEEEP* *BEEEP* *BEEPBEEPBEEP* *BEEPBEEPBEEP* *BEE-*
“Goddamnit, alarm clock, I’M TRYING TO SLEEP! WHY THE HELL DID I EVEN SET YOU?! TODAY IS SATURDAY!” you yell, not realizing how loud you are. You might have woken up a neighbor with your swearing, but you HATE waking up earlier than you can. You smash the snooze button and turn the clock off. God, that thing is obnoxious. You try to shift back into sleep, but apparently your brain has decided you should stay up. Realizing this, you turn and adjust under your covers to get ready to get out of bed, your form shifting clumsily under your blankets. You turn your alarm clock towards you to see what the time is, as you had it facing the other way so you could turn it off faster. 6:30. Wait a minute… “Alex, you idiot! You could have just remembered the time it’s usually set to!” you scream to yourself. “Ugh… it’s dark in here. Better turn the light on.”
You fumble around in the low level of light supplied by your alarm clock for your bedside lamp. Eventually finding it, you turn the knob and its fluorescent bulb starts to light up the room. You move to get out of bed and fall to the floor. *THUD!* “Ow! Damnit!” That didn’t really hurt, but you have a tendency to say “Ow” if anything that could be remotely painful o uncomfortable happens to you. You crawl out of the sheets that came with you, get up, and stretch a bit before you notice and mutter to yourself, “It’s cold in here…” Deciding you won’t leave the house, you decline to take a shower. You just know you need to get some clothes on, so you walk over to your closet and pull out some clothes. You pull out a gray T-Shirt that advertises your favorite soft drink and a pair of comfortable pants from your drawers. After putting them on, you decide that you probably should take a shower, so you take your clothes back off and stagger in a tired gait similar to zombie to the door of your bathroom and in the process you step on a stray Lego. “OW!” That actually did hurt. You grab the toy brick and put it on your desk. You limp to the bathroom and close the door, locking it in fear of psychopaths in your house.
While you’re busy, let’s describe your room. Your bedroom is rather large and its center is empty. The door to the hallway is on the left, if viewed from the entrance. The bathroom door is on the right on the same wall and next to that is the door to a small closet with a few white steel drawers nailed to the wall. There is a large window on the wall opposite of the doors that shows a small backyard. The walls of your room are painted a sort of yellowish white; so faint it’s hard to notice. The trim is solid white and there is nothing special about it. The somewhat dirty carpet is wonderfully soft and washed-out beige in color.
Immediately across from the entry door is your bed. Its front faces the door. Its frame is made of varnished wood without any intricate designs on it, but there is a sort of edge decoration on the boards, but not much really. You’ve painted your name on the front in a language and alphabet you made up, removing any chance of selling it to someone else. The sheets that are normally in a cluttered mess in your bed are all bundled in a pile on the floor in front of your nightstand. The warm winter sheets are dark red and the summer sheets are white. You never really trade them out, instead opting just switch the blanket you sleep under.
Right next to your bed is your small nightstand. Again, it’s not very decorated but also made of varnished wood. It has two small drawers on the bottom and a shelf like surface right below the top. The bottom drawer contains a few magazines and the top is unfilled, aside from having a few dice and other odds and ends in it. You don’t know why you keep the dice. You’ve never even used them. The shelf contains a few pieces of jewelry, specifically a necklace you made last year out of pieces from an old, non-functioning radio and some string. Because why not. The other pieces of jewelry are a pair of silver earrings with marquise cut red garnets and a ring made out of brass with a piece of corundum attached to it.
On the surface of your nightstand is a rectangular alarm clock with rounded top edges. You press down on the top to tell it to snooze and doing so changes the color of light it gives off. It’s usually set to red, but when you’re scared of something, you set it to white. Of course, as you always smash the snooze button before you turn it off, you always need to set it back to your preferred color. In the center of the surface is your bedside lamp. It’s really just a glorified light bulb on an iron stand, but you like it. You picked it up in some garage sale. You also have a paperback copy of The Hobbit lying bookmarked and closed on the side closest to you. You finished it a while ago, but you haven’t bothered to move it back to your bookshelf, which lies in between the doors to your bathroom and hall. It’s got three shelves and is made of what you think is aluminum painted gray. It could be steel, though. The shelf has the entire Lord of the Rings series, an old book on coding you used to learn how to code, a few drawing notebooks, an old dictionary, and that’s about it. You do most of your reading online, and books never really seemed easy to use. The top has a few models on it, namely two plastic warriors, one wearing maroon chainmail armor and wielding a large halberd fighting a swordsman decked out in blue plate mail and holding a kite shield. Resting next to that is an immaculate sphere made out of clear and red glass with a figurine set in its core, all sitting on a triangular steel stand. You can’t quite make out what the figure in the center of the sphere is doing, but it looks like he’s yelling at the sky.
Across from the bathroom door is your computer desk. It seems to be made out of the same metal and paint as your bookshelf, aside from the top, which is made out of further varnished wood with a sheet of green glass on covering its top and both its two wooden slide-out tables for putting food on and its four equally distributed wooden drawers, all filled with nothing. The metal drawer under the top of the desk contains multiple pencils, pens, colored pencils, a ruler, some markers, a stack of paper, and a protractor. There are various coffee stains and many sheets of old papers, also with coffee stains, arranged haphazardly on your desk. Your computer tower lies right next to your desk against the window-wall to shield it from a clumsy kick. Its case is colored silver, black, red, and white and is covered in piles upon piles of CDs stacked on top of it. Your huge, black monitor is set on your Kensington MasterPiece Plus. Your old speakers are gray and starting to malfunction. You’ll need to replace them soon. Eh, you’ll do it tomorrow.
You turn the shower off and grab the towel from the hook installed next to it. *sring!*
“I need to get some food…” you say to yourself as you walk out of the bathroom, drying yourself off and putting your clothes back on. You walk through your room, intending to enter the hallway that connects the guest bedroom, the living room, the closet full of towels, tissues, paper towels, and toilet paper, and the spare office room that you use for storage, but instead you get distracted. You drag your hand across the chilled surface of your bookshelf, stopping to admire the glass object. Come to think of it, you don’t remember how you came across it. You don’t remember getting it along with the lamp or buying it. All you remember is finding it in one of your moving boxes when you came here. You exit the room, stopping to adjust the thermostat to send some heat into the house.
You set out for the white tiled kitchen, which is attached to the living room and separated from the office by a wall. You pass through your living room on the way there, which in the dark intensely terrifies you. It seems like someone’s always there, but that’s just a tall brass lamp in front of a painting of a farmhouse next to a river. You turn on the light to the kitchen and stroll over to the coffee pot, which you start up. You need your morning caffeine. Your body doesn’t like it when you wake up this early. Your stomach rumbles. “Ugh, nothing sounds good but I’m so hungry,” you moan to yourself. You grab an English muffin. Those things are wonderful. You’re too tired and lazy to make anything else anyways. You throw the muffins into the toaster like anyone would if their only current thoughts are on basic needs.
“I haven’t checked the news in a while… I think I’ll check it out,” you say to yourself as you collapse into a heap on the couch. You turn the TV on and the current channel is the Discovery Channel. Well, you’ve thrown away any hope of checking out the news in less than a minute. Good job! But the show they’re running about ducks is interesting and educational, so that justifies your fault.
You watch the show for roughly 13 minutes before remembering that you need to get your coffee and English muffin, which are most likely cold by now. You run to the kitchen and retrieve your food from the toaster, only to find that it’s still untoasted. “Augh! Why did I forget to turn it on?! I’m hungry enough as is…” You put the bread back in and make sure to turn it on this time. You move over to the coffee pot, clutching your empty stomach in pain. It’s still hot. Something’s going right today. You grab a cold porcelain mug with vertical burgundy and horizontal olive stripes on it and pour in about three quarters of the mug worth of coffee, then turn and take the half empty carton of half & half from your fridge and pour a bit of it in; enough to fill it in to about seven eighths of a mug, put it up, grab the glass jar of sugar, empty a substantial amount of the container in, stir it up with a metal spoon, and carefully bring it to the desk in your bedroom. Now it’s just as you like it; light beige and full of sugar. After setting it down, you turn on the master switch and then the computer.
You hear your toaster spring from the other end of the house. “Finally!” you yell as you run to the kitchen and get a napkin out. You set your English muffing on it and then put the napkin on the red marble countertop. You open the fridge to grab the plastic bottle of grape jelly before putting it back up in favor of the honey placed next to the toaster. You reach up to open the cabinet above the sink to grab a jar of peanut butter before looking out the window below it. Somebody’s walking around out there with a flashlight. You slowly and cautiously close the shutters, not trusting anyone who needs to be awake and walking outdoors at this early time. After thinking about time, you quickly glance at the clock, which says the time’s 6:54. You get back to opening that cabinet. You pull the peanut butter off of the cabinet shelf and set it down next to the honey. You grab a butterknife from the silverware drawer. You spread the peanut butter and douse the bread in honey. Returning to your room, you take a bite out of the English muffin sandwhich.
Your stiff body is sent shaking to the ground. Welcome to my Domain.
))
