Rebels & Mutineers is set in modern day New Orleans, Louisiana. R&M is fueled by player's plots and group input.
Supernatural people have always had their place in society, hidden in plain sight or locked away for their own protection. New Orleans, a haven for the strange and mysterious and a magnet for the supernatural.
Established: Oct. 27th, 2018 Recently Updated Posts && Recently Updated Threads
05.11.19
As the community reels from the untimely death of Lucia Lovelle, life has to move on. Primrose readies for the annual Prom celebration! Keep your eye out for a event board and have fun!
02.27.19
It's not too late to vote for February's OTM winners! The winners for January, keep an eye out on your messages for your winner's graphics for your signature. Already voted? Make sure you check out the Mardi Gras event board! Party up, have a good time, and enjoy!
Post by Garrett Lee Whitford on May 3, 2019 5:50:35 GMT
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Garrett’s ability was passive, invisible, which meant for the most part it was easy to keep it from the Monroeville staff. They knew what he was capable, of course— they had access to years of detailed therapy notes from his childhood, a time when he’d been honest and thorough in describing the eerily coincidental ‘hallucinations’ brought on by the various mental disorders he turned out not to have.
But since his arrival at Monroeville, Garrett had gone out of his way to hide any traces of his ‘gift’. ’Must have grown out of it’, he’d answered with a shrug, the one time someone pointed out that he was a pretty useless psychic. ’Yeah, I knew you were going to be wearing that stupid shirt today.’ He was hilarious. But the less appealing his power seemed— the less reason anyone had to bother him. He may have been a coward, but he was proud to be a coward with all his digits in tact.
Unfortunately, sometimes his body wasn’t willing to cooperate with his life-elongating plans. While it was easy to hide the little things, the feelings and symbols which certainly hadn’t lessened as he aged, there was little he could do when his premonitions encompassed all his senses. It had been a few years since he had had a big one like this, where his eyes rolled back and he collapsed on the floor like a limp sack of flour. He’d been in the hallway, and his head hit something hard on the way down— a doorknob, maybe, he wasn’t completely sure. He came to a few hours later, decidedly not in the hallway he last remembered. And that.. that was the start of his problem.
”Fuck,” he muttered, squinting against the bright light. Another profanity escaped his lips as his head pounded and he lifted his hand to it, feeling a little blood matted into his hair. The crinkling of paper beneath him confirmed that he’d been brought to one of the medical offices. He lifted his other hand and found that it had been bound to the side of the bed with a cuff. Fuck.
The thought brought some urgency to his motions. He forced his eyes open, head turned away from the light this time, towards the source of a noise and to the figure of a woman he recognized well, Doctor Charlotte Devereaux. He didn’t know if she had been sent to deal with him or was just passing by on her way to the supply closets, but Garrett figured she was his best chance at making a clean getaway.
”Hey,” he said quietly, clearing his throat to get rid of the hoarseness in his voice brought on by sleep. ”Any chance we can cut right to the part where I tell you I don’t remember anything, you hand me some pills, and I get to go back to my room?”
[attr="class","tctext"] Charlie used to find it very easy to separate herself from certain events. Putting up the glass wall was all she was good at emotionally; anything else required work and she was never good at emotional work. Physical and mental labor? Those were absolutely nothing. Actual toiling in the depth of her heart and mind? Nope. Error 404. Please try again later. She wished her ability extended to herself permanently; there was a natural cruelty that it couldn’t. It could be a Band-Aid for a little bit, but even Band-Aids eventually had to come off. Delaying trauma only made it fester more. She had been forced to take enough psychology classes to know that, at the very least. She had taken other classes as well, enough to know that they were on the edge of something. She didn’t exactly want to be around when that shit hit the fan, but it wasn’t like she had a bunch of options of places to go.[break][break]
Her job at Monroeville had to go on, despite her suspicions and her reservations. There was always a reminder that not much separated her from the other patients. One or two of them had doctorates too, and now they spent their days banging their heads against windows or ripping pages out of library books. Monroeville was her forced home; the sterile white walls had built her just as much as they caged her and the patients. Besides, she didn’t know anything for sure, she feebly reminded herself. It had just been a while since she last saw one patient; that wasn’t that unheard of in Monroeville. [break][break]
But she knew it was different, and she definitely didn’t like any of it.[break][break]
Still, she had to show up and she had to do things, like taking care of the other patients. Other precogs, apparently, who liked to pass out in hallways and possibly give themselves concussions. She cursed under her breath as a nurse passed off the chart to her. “Sorry to both you with this, Dr. Devereaux,” the nurse murmured, sensing Charlie’s obvious done-ness. The psychiatrist waved her off. She had very little time to appear like she gave a shit about the low-totem-pole workers, and most of them were used to it anyway.[break][break]
Once she was actually in the room, she tossed the chart aside and leveled her gaze at the man in the bed. Another goddamn precog. They were determined to send her to an early grave. “You should know better than to tell me that you can’t remember anything, Mr. Whitford.” Damn, she wanted nothing more than to be able to toss around drugs her entire shift and then go home. “Let’s start from the top, though. Tell me what you can manage to remember.”
Post by Garrett Lee Whitford on May 7, 2019 1:53:30 GMT
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“You should know better than to tell me that you can’t remember anything, Mr. Whitford.””Sorry, exaggeration.” Garrett rolled his eyes, as if she might have missed the sarcasm in his tone. ”Want me to start with my name, or what year it is? I don’t have a concussion.” He’d been in this situation enough times to know. His mind was clear, if not a little frantic, although his eyes struggled to focus on her against the bright light.
The vision he’d had has done nothing to increase his trust in Monroeville’s doctors, which wasn't exactly high to begin with. He knew that Charlie had been a patient here, once, and that fact that she of all people was willing to stomach the shit that went on filled him with rage. Granted, that was a little hypocritical. He knew about things that went on behind closed doors too. He’d seen the kinds of punishments.. treatments.. that the staff came up with, but he rationalized them, justified them. It was a survival tactic, one of the only ones that worked in this shit hole, but Garrett had a limit to what he was willing to look past. And jesus christ the things he’d just seen were it.
”Tell me what you can manage to remember.” He knew what she wanted to talk about, but that wasn't the answer she was getting. If spending time with him was inconvenient for her, she was more than welcome let him go. ”Just.. being dizzy. Whacked the back of my head on something. Is the handcuff really necessary?” he asked, shaking his wrist so that the metal clanged against the side of the table.
[attr="class","tctext"] Charlie really did not have the patience for smart mouthing today, not that that mattered for anything. “In your actual telling of events, I must ask you to stick to the literal and not the figurative, Mr. Whitford,” she reminded him, feeling more like a robot than usual. She watched his eyes readjust to the harsh light of the room, checked their pupil size and response. No, a concussion was unlikely, but she didn’t really care about that and she was very bad about faking as though she were. [break][break]
They were about the same age, a thought which always rubbed Charlie the wrong way. They were two sides of the same coin, and he had come in just as she was “going out.” If she hadn’t done that, she’d probably be where he was: handcuffed to a hospital bed. But she wasn’t, and she wasn’t going to feel sorry for their differences. She had had her fucking fill of feeling sorry lately. If Garrett wanted to go around bumping his head, that was on him. She was just the doctor within proximity. And the de facto expert on dealing with pre-cogs, but she wasn’t feeling very good about that claim lately. [break][break]
“Play ball, Garrett.” She dragged the physician’s chair to his bedside, crossing her legs and arms. The handcuff key master was on the keyring at her belt, and they both knew it. Still, she disconnected the keyring and put it in clear view on her lap. “We both know what I want, and I’m not in the mood to go digging today.” That was pretty much a bluff. Visions weren’t memories; they weren’t freely open to her. She could fish them out; after all, she had with…the last one. But it wasn’t easy and sometimes it left the memory in tatters, if not the brain attached to it. “Give me a general idea, and you get free. More detail and I may let you go back to your room before the mandatory wait time.” She knew how to cut deals; it was how she had made her life out of Monroeville.
Post by Garrett Lee Whitford on May 11, 2019 5:31:58 GMT
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Garrett sighed when she dragged the chair over to him, no more in the mood for this shit than she was, but apparently they were both being stubborn. “We both know what I want, and I’m not in the mood to go digging today.””Maybe I want you to dig for it.” he said, a hint of a challenge in his voice. Maybe he wanted her to see everything he had had to. Maybe he wanted her to try and sleep tonight with the girl’s cries echoing in her ears. Because fuck- he sure as hell wasn’t going to be able to.
More than all that, though, he wanted to get his damn hand freed before he was the one people were commenting offhandedly that they hadn’t seen in a while. It was a fair deal, information in exchange for freedom, and he was smart enough to take it. ”Your boss, torturing a patient.” He watched her face carefully for any signs of acknowledgement, any indication whether or not she knew what was going on or.. would be going on.. though he was fairly positive that even if the specific scene he'd witnessed hadn't happened yet, it was far from the first time. ”He’s a monster. You realize that, don’t you?“ Because Charlie didn’t seem stupid. ”If this doesn’t stop soon someone’s going to get killed.”
[attr="class","tctext"] “Don’t tempt me.” Charlie had had plenty practice with schooling her emotions and her reactions. It had made her a particularly good foe as a child and served her well in clinical. Most had read it as her being as non-judgmental as possible, but the coldness in her eyes had precluded such explanations. It was a general malaise of indifference and so easy to flick into that she often did so without meaning to. This time, however, she very much meant to, but something fell through the cracks in the concerned twitch in the corner of her mouth. She did her best to ignore it. “That’s a mighty accusation. You’d have to have more than a possible vision to back it up,” she informed him as her face shifted back into its quiet detachment, even as her heart thrummed a bit harder. Fuck. She really wasn’t in the mood for this sort of conversation.[break][break]
Someone had already gotten killed. Maybe if he was a precog worth his salt, he would know that. She set her teeth on edge, but she was only as good as her word. Without protest, she reached forward and unlocked his cuffed hand. His words echoed in her head. He’s a monster. As if that was news to her. “The world is full of monsters. Most of them are just gathered here.” On the staff or on the docket, they were all something in Monroeville. It was just very rare that one had lived in the shoes of both. In life, you had very little choice, or else that was what her life had taught her. There were monsters, and eventually everyone you knew either became one or was eaten by one. Only the worst of them ever made it out unscathed. “What do you really think is happening, Mr. Whitford?” She tried to regain her composure, sitting back in the chair and crossing her legs and arms.
Post by Garrett Lee Whitford on May 14, 2019 17:36:54 GMT
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“That’s a mighty accusation. You’d have to have more than a possible vision to back it up.” Garrett let out a sardonic laugh. ”What does it matter? I could put a bloody weapon and a signed confession in front of you right now and it wouldn’t make a damn difference.” He’d danced this dance a hundred times, both in Monroeville and out of it. He was a convicted criminal with a mental rap sheet a mile long and that gave him no credibility anywhere. But Charlie still knew that he was right. It wasn't the first time Garrett had seen a patient being tortured.. but it was the first time he was legitimately concerned they might not make it out of the room. ”You want proof you can dig for it. Come on. I’m offering.” he taunted again, free hand waving towards his head. He was an open book.
As soon as his other hand was free he pulled it towards himself, rubbing his wist and then sitting up, turning on the bed to face her directly, rather than from below. He wanted to look her in the eye while she spouted her poetic bullshit about how they all were monsters. ”Yeah? And what about the ones who aren’t?” he asked. Sure, Monroeville had terrible people. Probably more of them than you’d stumble across in your average day to day life. But there were plenty of people there who weren’t awful, who couldn’t or wouldn’t intentionally hurt a fucking mouse, and as the person capable of getting into any of their heads, he was willing to bet Charlie knew it too.
”What do I really think is happening?” he repeated, the incredulousness back again. Well, she had asked. ”I think you’re avoiding the subject. I think you know who I’m talking about, you know where she is, and you know that you’re… maybe the only person here who can do a damn thing about it.” And fuck, maybe she couldn’t. Maybe nobody could. But she couldn’t pretend that what was happening was in any way, shape, or form okay. ”I think you know there’s a very fine line separating you from us, and you’re just as scared as I am of ending up in that room.”
[attr="class","tctext"] He had a point, she acknowledged with a nod of her head. Some things were above them all; Jasper was chief among them. He thought he was a god, and that belief mostly shielded him. She had been part of that shield, she reflected. Still was. Technically, it was her duty to wipe these visions from Garrett’s mind, stitch together some hold-overs, and report the whole thing. If it happened too often, those patients had a tendency to end up in the shadowy corners. She shook her head at his insistence. Precognitive minds gave her a raging fucking headache on a good day. “I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.”[break][break]
He met her eyes, and she fought back a scowl. They didn’t seem too different or separate now that he had the handcuff off. She didn’t particularly enjoy that reminder. “They get out usually. Or they turn too, or they just break. We've both been here long enough to see all three happen,” she reminded him. It was all only a matter of time. Discharging had gotten a hell of a lot less common, troubling as that was, but more than that, she had seen some buckle under time, in some way, shape, or another.[break][break]
He was so very close, and that was what made her uncomfortable the most. She had no idea where Lu – no, the patient was. It bothered her that she didn’t know, and it bothered her that it bothered her. There were so many wide-eyed kids locked up in Monroeville, but Lucy was different. Lucy was kind without meaning to be, which was the rarest thing Charlie had ever encountered. People who were good for no rhyme, no reason; those were fucking incredibly hard to find. She shifted slightly in the chair and rearranged the placement of her arms, as if that would make the uncomfortable feeling go away. Fuck. He was supposed to be a precog not a fucking empath.[break][break]
“You’re overestimating my station here, Mr. Whitford. I’ve no clue what you’re talking about.” It wasn’t a total lie, after all. “But if I did, I would certainly be careful who I talked to.” It wasn’t a threat, and she kept her tone even to ward off accusations that it was. It was a warning. “As far as you know, you slipped in the hall and just hit your head really hard. That’s all my summary will say, of course.” His truth was harmless enough; the whole of Monroeville was beginning to echo. That’s what she tried to tell herself, but she knew it was a risk. It was also an opportunity. Things were going a bit sideways. Everything was knocking into each other, and she had found that her once predictable life had become a bit muddy. “Any time you think you might have hit your head again, however, my office is open.” Desperate times and all.
Post by Garrett Lee Whitford on Jun 2, 2019 7:19:00 GMT
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”They get out usually.” Garrett scoffed, interrupting her. ”When was the last time you saw a patient walk out of here?” It had been years. They used to evaluate patients for release, not often, but enough for it to be considered a fairly standard procedure. For the first few years, he had expected that he would be one of the ones lucky enough to leave. Now he knew better. Garrett couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen an evaluation, let alone anyone actually getting out of there for good.
She was right though. Most people broke. Most people would never leave, because Monroeville left them so fucked up that they couldn’t ever return to normal society. ”Can’t imagine why anyone would break down here.” he said with heavy sarcasm. He could imagine it. He could imagine it in vivid detail. Part of him wished that Charlie had dug though his head, taken out the memory and filled its place with some fabricated bullshit about how he spent his day. Then it wouldn’t be his problem, he would be absolved of all responsibility.
Instead, he and Charlie could share the burden of knowledge. She’d never admit to it, but he could tell that she felt something- that even if he had been wrong, he hadn’t been wrong about all of it, and maybe, just maybe that was enough. Charlie didn't have complete power over what happened- he knew that. But the women had contact with the outside world. She had the ability to act on the things she knew. Anyone else that Garrett would share it with would either have him locked up in isolation, or get themselves killed trying to fight back and so Charlie was right.. again.. he couldn’t tell anyone else.
”Any time you think you might have hit your head again, however, my office is open.” He let out a breath in a mostly silent chuckle, the corner of his lip quirking up. ”Careful,” he warned her, ”for a second it almost sounded like you cared.” He wouldn’t tell anyone about that either.
[attr="class","tctext"] He had a point. Another one. Charlie took a steadying breath in and out through her nose. “There hasn’t been a lot of turnover in recent years, no,” she agreed through all but gritted teeth. She tried to wrack her brain for the last one that had been released, but all she could immediately conjure were the re-evals that Jasper had deemed too unfit to live outside of Monroeville, no matter their actual condition. It wasn’t like Jasper had asked her for a real opinion on any one of them; he had all but written her comments for her. Before, that didn’t bother her. She was just a cog, and she was in the loop. And now she wasn’t so much in the loop and the stakes felt higher.[break][break]
It was too easy to wave her magic memory wand and make it all new and better. It was too easy to dig through memories with a fine tooth comb and pick out the nasty nits that caused wrinkles in best laid plans. It was too easy and the mercy it offered was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It was a bandaid on a gushing dam. “Not at all. We’re all sunshine and rainbows here at Monroeville Hospital,” she managed in her best flat tone. She had rooted around in enough heads that she knew that was far from the fucking truth. There was only one true optimist in Monroeville, and well … that hadn’t ended well.[break][break]
She let out a little snort of annoyance and tried to fight the teenage urge to roll her eyes. “Don’t say that too loudly. You never know who might overhear you.” This conversation wasn’t doing her any favors. She never liked to feel like someone else could see her cards to play, but he was so right. And it was so frustrating.[break][break]
All her life she had been kept aloof. It was easier, “mentors” told her, to not pretend that she was on the same playing ground as someone who could just make water out of the air. She shouldn’t have to think she was the same as the people that called Monroeville their home. It had been corporate lies in pretty bows, and by the time she realized it, she was too enmeshed in it to quit. There was nowhere else to go. “What about if you did, hypothetically, get out one day? Would you spend your time hitting your head again?” she inquired of him suddenly. He wasn’t going to be able to pretend that the world outside of Monroeville wasn’t just as fucked up as it was inside.[break][break]
Post by Garrett Lee Whitford on Jun 5, 2019 6:37:27 GMT
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“Not at all. We’re all sunshine and rainbows here at Monroeville Hospital.” The longer he spoke with Charlie the more the doctor began to sound like a real person, one who had thoughts and opinions verses the mindless robots staff were expected to be. Not to mention, she was fucking sarcastic. ”You should put that on the brochure.” Garrett said wryly. She told him not to speak too loudly after his own quip and he dropped it. She was doing him a favor, ultimately, letting him leave there with a clean record. He wasn’t going to ruin any chances of her actually helping other people there by being a shit.
He was almost expecting her to leave when she asked another question. One he really hadn’t anticipated, even after their discussion. “What about if you did, hypothetically, get out one day? Would you spend your time hitting your head again?””Probably,” he said with a shrug, ”considering nobody’s ever found a way to switch this off.” He gave a lazy gesture towards his head. If he could have stopped having visions, he would have done it a long time ago. ”I know better than to waste my time thinking about something that’s never going to happen.” he added, a little defensively.
Sure, people had gotten out. Young people; smart, attractive people; people who’s families had a boatload of money and influence. He came up short on all accounts. Garrett didn’t have a story, or a face, that you could market on the news as ‘rehabilitation’. To dream about it would have been stupid. ”But I guess I’d try and get a job, to pay for some shitty apartment where the neighbors play music at two in the morning. Go for walks outside, eat food that didn’t come out of a can.. maybe get a dog.” So maybe he had dreamed, just a little. Garrett knew the world outside of Monroeville wasn’t all rainbows and sunshine, but it was the little things, the ones people took for granted, that made it so appealing.
[attr="class","tctext"] Had she been someone else in some other life, she might have laughed. As it were, she only gave a ‘humph.’ “They would never let me write the brochure, but I’ll put the word in to the committee,” Charlie assured him in her usual deadpan. She was not supposed to speak so openly with the patients, but she was pretty sure that they weren’t supposed to be torturing them either. The rules of Monroeville were all but built to be broken, and they were constantly changing depending on who sat at the head of the board. They all lead a string bean existence, dependent on some puppet master who neither knew nor cared for them. Monroeville had always seemed to be on its own plane of existence. With its own god. "If you could a 'cure,' you would be a very wealthy man and very few of us would have a job. Maybe that's why no one's ever bothered releasing one.""[break][break]
Charlie had never been paraded as a paragon of Monroeville’s success; she worked best when no one knew her at all, when she didn’t make an impact and when nothing impacted her. It worked for the most part, but what it really meant was that she lived in the shallow. Garrett’s simple dreams underlined that for her, and the uncomfortableness of the situation got to her. She scribbled notes about the “minor head trauma” to finish his chart and stood. ”Well, Mr. Whitford, if you ever get out, I’m sure you can find a lovely shotgun shack. And a wiry mutt. For now, you’re free to return to your regular schedule.” It was more than she had. She turned to go but stopped, turning to look at him with a hard glance. ”And remember, the next time you bump your head or even think you might, my office is open.” Nodding more to herself than anyone else, she tossed his chart back on the counter and made her escape, the door open for him.
