APPLICATION
Let me tell you the story of Jerrika Lang
And the ten thousand ways that she died.
The Player
User Name/Nick: Catherine McFabulous. OR JUST CATHERINE IDK.
User LJ: N/ahhh
AIM/IM: stoptheworld26
E-mail: michaelheroin@gmail.com
Other Characters: Adrian Temple
The Character
Character Name: Nathan Young
Character Journal: saveme_barry
Canon: Misfits
Age: I'm not sure. We know that he's old enough to drive, but the series is described as being about 'teenagers', so he's definitely between 17 and 20. I'd go with him being 18 or 19, I think.
From When?: In the last episode of season one of Misfits, Nathan steps into a little garage and gets suited up to go take down a brainwashing evil cult lady and save his friends (Arguably the first major unselfish act of his life). This is what The Wood decides to avert.
Abilities/Powers: IMMORTALITY. Nathan doesn’t die. OR more accurately, he does die, and then his body just about claws itself back from death. His injuries don’t go away, he still has to heal at a normal pace, and it still hurts, but he doesn’t die.
Not that he actually knows he has this power, of course.
Power Limitations: No restriction? If that's okay?
Inventory:
A SNAZZY GREY SUIT, and some snazzy polished shoes which he’ll be wearing when he appears
I-Pod and headphones
A tin containing the necessary components for getting high (aka. A nice big bag of marijuana, rolling papers, a pocket grinder, a couple of train tickets, and some tobacco.)
Mobile phone
Passport
Wallet containing a tenner, a driving license, a bunch of discount/shop cards, a credit card, a bank card, an out of date fake id
House keys which don’t fit any locks anymore
A pretty hefty shoulder bag
A LESS SNAZZY Orange boiler suit, in the shoulder bag
TRAINERS in the shoulder bag
A NORMAL SET OF CLOTHES! Aka: Jeans, t-shirt, zip up hoodie, belt. ALSO IN THE SHOULDER BAG
A water pistol designed to look like a real gun
(I know this is quite a lot of stuff, but Nathan's being taken RIGHT AFTER deciding not to take a train out of town, so he had quite a lot of his worldly possessions with him.)
Personality: The word used most frequently to describe Nathan is: “prick”, and it’s a fairly accurate summation of his personality. The first impression which he tends to give off is that of an overconfident bully. He’s crass, unpleasant, and seems to have no understanding of how far is too far. He latches onto anything that he can use to insult someone, and he seems to be literally incapable of dropping the joke, no matter how openly angry or upset his target may be getting. He’s prone to bragging and theatrics, and honestly seems to spend the vast majority of his life prancing from one attention grabbing tactic to the next.
From this first impression, one might assume that Nathan’s quite a confident young man, the kind who puts down less popular teens, with a host of jock buddies backing him up every step of the way. This assumption really couldn’t possibly be any further than the truth. Nathan’s repellent personality and nigh invisible good points have left him with few close or reliable friendships, and while he does have better qualities, the opportunities for these qualities to surface before he’s already thoroughly established himself, first and foremost, as a tremendous prick are few and far between.
Underneath his questionable sense of humor and his desperate desire for attention, Nathan is actually a pretty fundamentally lonely and insecure young man. He’s obsessively protective and possessive over his mother, and unjustifiably hostile towards any men who come into her life, to the point that she eventually locks him out of her home just to stop him from driving her current boyfriend away with his incessant meanness. He does eventually figure out that protecting his mother isn’t necessarily the same as forcing her to live a life in solitude, but until he arrives at this point he’s willing to do anything in his power to get his own way, including accusing her boyfriends of sexually abusing him to get her to choose him over them.
This dependency on his mother is coupled with an outright hatred of his father, who was an absent figure in his childhood. Part of why Nathan is so callous in his interactions with people is that in their place he would be completely unfazed, it’s commented numerous times by his mother and colleagues that because nothing ever hurts him he’s unable to appreciate how hurtful his comments can be. The one time when we see Nathan seem genuinely upset by the behavior of another person, is when his father comes to bail him out for stealing and vandalism, this is also the first time when Nathan’s refusal to take any situation or any other person seriously is used as an emotional defense mechanism. Usually, he seems to just work on autopilot, his abuse falling somewhere between just seeming like an appropriate kind of social interaction for him, and a desperate showy attempt to impress people (he sometimes even looks around after making a particularly brilliant comment, just to see if anyone’s noticed how clever he is). When he employs the same kind of approach to talking to his father though, it’s far more deliberate. He needs to emphasise just how little meaning his father has to him, just how little he needs the man who was never in his life when he was younger. He actually rejects his fathers help to the point that he chooses a police record and community service, over having to accept his help. Possibly a more defining point on the relationship between Nathan and his Father, is that his dad is all too happy to let him do so.
At times, Nathan employs his urge to overact and draw attention to himself as a way of distracting people from more important things, sometimes personal things about himself, and at other times from bigger and more dangerous secrets that he needs to keep hidden. For example, in order to prevent a woman finding a dead body in the boot of her car, instead of taking the normal approach and trying to distract her subtly, Nathan literally launches himself forward and flings a brick at the middle of her car windscreen, declaring it pure, mindless vandalism for it's own sake.
This reflects, in part, another fairly important ability which Nathan is lacking in. The foresight and empathy to appreciate how his actions create consequences for other people to deal with. While when he is directly confronted with the emotional or physical harm that he's done to people through his thoughtlessness, Nathan does show a kind of uneasy, somewhat compromised regret for what he's done, he spends far too much of his life operating on a level that never accesses this kind of confrontation. He does something, laughs about it, and moves on without having to address any lasting damage caused.
There is a distinction to be made here. Nathan does not stop long enough to to consider the consequences that his actions have on other people, however, he's in no way oblivious to the consequences which his actions have upon his own life. He is embarked upon a kind of self sabotage fueled by the teenage philosophy that it's better to thoroughly enjoy a short life, than to suffer through a long and meaningless one. It's not that he's depressive or particularly bleak in his approach to life, more that he has set his own expectations of himself low enough that he doesn't care how much he fucks up his future. He doesn't believe that he's capable of having a successful adulthood, so he has adapted what it is that he wants from life to meet the standards that he's set for himself. He defines himself as style over substance, and it becomes a self fulfilling prophesy.
In he finale scene of the last episode (one which Nathan won't have actually experienced at the point in which he enters the game), he stands on the roof of a building and makes an impassioned speech to a group of his brainwashed friends. The driving message of the speech is that the right to be free and evolve and to make your own mistakes while you're doing it, is far more wonderful a thing than to be forced to live a long safe life of conformity. It's about how beautiful his generation is, despite the mess that they've made of themselves, and it's about the immense diversity that comes with living by your own rules. It's a moment where he is the very best that he can be, he's considered the risk to himself, considered running away, considered how he could proceed with his plan, and when his initial execution went wrong, he adapted it, and instead of running away he appealed to the people who he knew and did his level best to bring them back to themselves despite deriving no personal gain from doing so.
On paper? It's a revolutionary, heroic act. However, this isn't the framework through which Nathan understands himself, so even in his moment of selflessness, he celebrates instead the degree to which he is a walking disaster:
"She's got you thinking this is how you're supposed to be? Well it's not! We're young! We are supposed to drink too much! We're supposed to have bad attitudes and shag each others brains out! We are designed to party! This is it! Yeah so a few of us will overdose or go mental, but Charles Darwin said, "you can't make an ommelette without breaking a few eggs", and that's what it's all about: Breaking eggs! And by eggs I do mean getting twatted on a cocktail of class-a's.
If you could just see yourselves, It breaks my heart! You're wearing cardigans! We had it all! We fucked up bigger, and better than any generation that came before us! We were so BEAUTIFUL!
We're screw ups, I'm a screw up, and I plan to be a screw up, until my late twenties, possibly even my early thirties, and I will shag my own mother, before I let her, or anybody else take that away from me!"
This is how Nathan sees his life, his moment of heroism is simultaneously a celebration of being doomed. While there are no two ways about the fact that this is Nathan's last ditch effort to save the free will of his friends, the only way he knows how to address this is to preach the nobility of failure, because this is all he believes he can offer them. With no hope and no future beyond the next big mistake.
History: Unfortunately, since Misfits is a tiny English show of a meager six episodes, the amount of history Nathan is given is not that extensive. The following things we either know, or can extrapolate from the subtext of the series:
Nathan's mother was Irish, his father was English, and judging by his accent he lived in Ireland for a number of years before settling in England.
His father was largely absent in his childhood, and at best seems to have seen him as an unpleasant obligation. Because of this, as a child he developed a strong relationship with his mother, and possibly a touch of an oedipal complex. He certainly became prone to jealousy and manipulative tendencies when it came to his mothers various boyfriends, coming up with excuses and lies to break her up with them to keep her to himself.
Nathan was given an Anti Social Behavior Order (or an ASBO) and issued with a community service sentence, after his bad attitude escalated the relatively minor crime of stealing some sweets from a bowling alley, to destroying some expensive equipment during an escape attempt, to finally firing a nail gun into the back of the hand of the manager of the bowling alley. He was assigned to fulfill his community service sentence alongside a group of other juvenile delinquents, under the guidance of an emotionally strained parole officer.
On the first day of his Community service, there was a huge and mysterious storm, dropping huge clumps of ice from the sky, before a bolt of lightning electrified the delinquents, bestowing them with superpowers, unfortunately, the storm also gave their parole officer a berserk-like rage eventually driving him to try and kill them. Using their newfound gifts, the delinquents fight back and accidentally kill their parole officer, burying him on the bank of a river.
Nathan is kicked out of his home by his mother, who is determined to make it work with her current boyfriend. At first Nathan is extremely resistant, and tries everything from begging his mother, to trying to unmask her boyfriend as a pervert. Nothing works though, and after having sex with an eighty year old woman by accident (as another effect of the storm was to temporarily return to her her youth.), Nathan realized that he didn't want his mother to grow up to be lonely, so he gave her boyfriend his blessing, told them both that he had a flat, and continued to illegally squat in the community center where he was doing his community service.
The Virtue Organization, begins to hypnotize young local people in Nathan's area, into being clean cut right wing Christians. This is done by yet another local who was affected by the storm. As the delinquents begin to be picked off and brainwashed, Nathan and the two surviving members formulate an amazing plan to rescue their lost friends. Basically all this plan entails was wearing headphones to block off the hypnotic voice of the Virtue Organization. The problem with this plan is that the three can no longer hear one another either, and Nathan eventually abandons one of the surviving delinquents: Kelly. Kelly is arguably his best friend of the series, whom he's been nurturing an attraction towards.
The one other surviving delinquent abandons Nathan, for his progressively bad treatment of him. Nathan tries to make contact with Kelly again, only to find her chavvish bad attitude has been toned down into a beige glaze of acceptableness. He tries to convince her that she was better before, and he confesses that he should never have left her. Kelly's too heavily brainwashed to be reached, and, now thoroughly alone? Nathan decides to get the next train out of town and jet the Virtue organization win.
At the very last minute he decides that he can't bring himself to abandon his friends, and instead he formulates a plan to infiltrate the Virtue organization and force them to fix his friends.
It is at this point that Nathan falls through the Arch.
MYSTERIOUSLY FAMILIAR Update: Nathan spent a little bit of time in the woods/barracks, generally being weird and annoying with fellow youthful miscreant Tommy Solomon. There's not much of note that happened, except that the two occasionally beat each other up, bothered/adopted AGENT PETE and went candy corn harvesting around October. And then they wandered off into the woods one day in search of legit magic mushrooms. As far as Nathan's concerned, he and Tommy have only been gone for an hour.
First Person Sample: Hello? Hello? Is anyone out there? Look, this isn't funny! I know that someone must be out there because I think I would remember if I had set off on the kind of acid bender that ends in the middle of the woods with--
[Pause, as he's checking something]
--all right, without some twat managing to come along and lift my Ipod in the mean time. Anyway, my point is, whoever is out there, if you think you're going to play a little Big Brother meets Deliverance with me? Then you've forgotten one important fact:
This is England, you twat! The forests aren't big enough to get lost in for more than ten minutes! And they all have middle aged National Forestry Commission wankers paroling the borders and massaging their genitals while they thank god for the fact that their job consists of wandering through a glorified public park and picking up dog shit and empty crisp packets every day!
So, if you'll excuse me, I'll just be over here looking for that guy.
Prose Sample: All right, so shouting at the trees hadn't solved his problem, and Nathan was sure he'd been walking for more than ten minutes now with no sight of a way out of the woods yet. Although he wasn't inclined to show it yet (because whoever brought him here could well be watching, and he sure as hell didn't want them thinking now would be good time to strike...) he was actually beginning to get a little worried. What if they'd found some remote little pit in the middle of the lake district and he was going to be walking for hours?
Surreptitiously, he slid a hand into his pocket and pulled out his phone, stealing a paranoid glance over his shoulder as he did so. He still couldn't see anyone... but that didn't mean that they weren't there. Turning his attention back to his phone, he checked the signal. Still no bars.
Maybe he could still text? You didn't need a signal to text, did you?
He keyed in the message: "Have been kidnapped and dumped in a forest trace this number + Ill try again later. this is nathan young check my asbo for details x" before sending it to 999. A little symbol came up on his screen to acknowledge that the message was sending, and Nathan mentally congratulated himself for the added detail of the kiss. Who amongst the ugly old cat ladies and desperate queers who populated the emergency services wouldn't appreciate a little text message kiss from him?
Nathan was mentally preening over the idea of an obese, buck toothed lady shedding a tear of happiness over her call center headphones announcing his text message, when his mobile began to emit the obnoxious Nokia ring tune to alert him to the arrival of a new text message.
"Hello Nathan! Don't worry, we're coming to get you now..."
For a minute, he was reassured! The police had got his message they were coming to get him! Only... since when did the emergency services line actually reply to text messages? Was that even possible? Shouldn't it have come from a different number, and shouldn't it have said something about sending a car to his location instead of just... coming to get him? Suddenly Nathan was not at all sure that he wanted to be gotten, so he dealt with the situation in the same mature way that he would have made any other group of people lose interest in trying to help him. Hitting the reply button, he quickly keyed in: "hurry! there's a man here with a giant cock and he looks like he knows how to..." Send. Wait a few seconds. Then type out the punch line, "thanks a lot wankers i just got raped and murdered. stop wasting police time looking for me and go avenge my death. he sounded scottish x"
He hit send, maybe this time the kiss would persuade whatever was out there to take pity on him, and not reply again.
Special Notes: Sorry for god modding The Wood a bit in my sample, I promise not to do that in the actual game. I just was about to put that the reply he got was a "message not sent" notification, and realized that actually getting a reply would probably make for a more interesting sample and give me more to do and my INNER STORYTELLER JUST TOOK OVER, I'M SORRY.
Anyhow, If he gets in then I'll ask mods what happens if/when he tries to text people from The Wood. Because he totally will. :c
And the ten thousand ways that she died.
The Player
User Name/Nick: Catherine McFabulous. OR JUST CATHERINE IDK.
User LJ: N/ahhh
AIM/IM: stoptheworld26
E-mail: michaelheroin@gmail.com
Other Characters: Adrian Temple
The Character
Character Name: Nathan Young
Character Journal: saveme_barry
Canon: Misfits
Age: I'm not sure. We know that he's old enough to drive, but the series is described as being about 'teenagers', so he's definitely between 17 and 20. I'd go with him being 18 or 19, I think.
From When?: In the last episode of season one of Misfits, Nathan steps into a little garage and gets suited up to go take down a brainwashing evil cult lady and save his friends (Arguably the first major unselfish act of his life). This is what The Wood decides to avert.
Abilities/Powers: IMMORTALITY. Nathan doesn’t die. OR more accurately, he does die, and then his body just about claws itself back from death. His injuries don’t go away, he still has to heal at a normal pace, and it still hurts, but he doesn’t die.
Not that he actually knows he has this power, of course.
Power Limitations: No restriction? If that's okay?
Inventory:
A SNAZZY GREY SUIT, and some snazzy polished shoes which he’ll be wearing when he appears
I-Pod and headphones
A tin containing the necessary components for getting high (aka. A nice big bag of marijuana, rolling papers, a pocket grinder, a couple of train tickets, and some tobacco.)
Mobile phone
Passport
Wallet containing a tenner, a driving license, a bunch of discount/shop cards, a credit card, a bank card, an out of date fake id
House keys which don’t fit any locks anymore
A pretty hefty shoulder bag
A LESS SNAZZY Orange boiler suit, in the shoulder bag
TRAINERS in the shoulder bag
A NORMAL SET OF CLOTHES! Aka: Jeans, t-shirt, zip up hoodie, belt. ALSO IN THE SHOULDER BAG
A water pistol designed to look like a real gun
(I know this is quite a lot of stuff, but Nathan's being taken RIGHT AFTER deciding not to take a train out of town, so he had quite a lot of his worldly possessions with him.)
Personality: The word used most frequently to describe Nathan is: “prick”, and it’s a fairly accurate summation of his personality. The first impression which he tends to give off is that of an overconfident bully. He’s crass, unpleasant, and seems to have no understanding of how far is too far. He latches onto anything that he can use to insult someone, and he seems to be literally incapable of dropping the joke, no matter how openly angry or upset his target may be getting. He’s prone to bragging and theatrics, and honestly seems to spend the vast majority of his life prancing from one attention grabbing tactic to the next.
From this first impression, one might assume that Nathan’s quite a confident young man, the kind who puts down less popular teens, with a host of jock buddies backing him up every step of the way. This assumption really couldn’t possibly be any further than the truth. Nathan’s repellent personality and nigh invisible good points have left him with few close or reliable friendships, and while he does have better qualities, the opportunities for these qualities to surface before he’s already thoroughly established himself, first and foremost, as a tremendous prick are few and far between.
Underneath his questionable sense of humor and his desperate desire for attention, Nathan is actually a pretty fundamentally lonely and insecure young man. He’s obsessively protective and possessive over his mother, and unjustifiably hostile towards any men who come into her life, to the point that she eventually locks him out of her home just to stop him from driving her current boyfriend away with his incessant meanness. He does eventually figure out that protecting his mother isn’t necessarily the same as forcing her to live a life in solitude, but until he arrives at this point he’s willing to do anything in his power to get his own way, including accusing her boyfriends of sexually abusing him to get her to choose him over them.
This dependency on his mother is coupled with an outright hatred of his father, who was an absent figure in his childhood. Part of why Nathan is so callous in his interactions with people is that in their place he would be completely unfazed, it’s commented numerous times by his mother and colleagues that because nothing ever hurts him he’s unable to appreciate how hurtful his comments can be. The one time when we see Nathan seem genuinely upset by the behavior of another person, is when his father comes to bail him out for stealing and vandalism, this is also the first time when Nathan’s refusal to take any situation or any other person seriously is used as an emotional defense mechanism. Usually, he seems to just work on autopilot, his abuse falling somewhere between just seeming like an appropriate kind of social interaction for him, and a desperate showy attempt to impress people (he sometimes even looks around after making a particularly brilliant comment, just to see if anyone’s noticed how clever he is). When he employs the same kind of approach to talking to his father though, it’s far more deliberate. He needs to emphasise just how little meaning his father has to him, just how little he needs the man who was never in his life when he was younger. He actually rejects his fathers help to the point that he chooses a police record and community service, over having to accept his help. Possibly a more defining point on the relationship between Nathan and his Father, is that his dad is all too happy to let him do so.
At times, Nathan employs his urge to overact and draw attention to himself as a way of distracting people from more important things, sometimes personal things about himself, and at other times from bigger and more dangerous secrets that he needs to keep hidden. For example, in order to prevent a woman finding a dead body in the boot of her car, instead of taking the normal approach and trying to distract her subtly, Nathan literally launches himself forward and flings a brick at the middle of her car windscreen, declaring it pure, mindless vandalism for it's own sake.
This reflects, in part, another fairly important ability which Nathan is lacking in. The foresight and empathy to appreciate how his actions create consequences for other people to deal with. While when he is directly confronted with the emotional or physical harm that he's done to people through his thoughtlessness, Nathan does show a kind of uneasy, somewhat compromised regret for what he's done, he spends far too much of his life operating on a level that never accesses this kind of confrontation. He does something, laughs about it, and moves on without having to address any lasting damage caused.
There is a distinction to be made here. Nathan does not stop long enough to to consider the consequences that his actions have on other people, however, he's in no way oblivious to the consequences which his actions have upon his own life. He is embarked upon a kind of self sabotage fueled by the teenage philosophy that it's better to thoroughly enjoy a short life, than to suffer through a long and meaningless one. It's not that he's depressive or particularly bleak in his approach to life, more that he has set his own expectations of himself low enough that he doesn't care how much he fucks up his future. He doesn't believe that he's capable of having a successful adulthood, so he has adapted what it is that he wants from life to meet the standards that he's set for himself. He defines himself as style over substance, and it becomes a self fulfilling prophesy.
In he finale scene of the last episode (one which Nathan won't have actually experienced at the point in which he enters the game), he stands on the roof of a building and makes an impassioned speech to a group of his brainwashed friends. The driving message of the speech is that the right to be free and evolve and to make your own mistakes while you're doing it, is far more wonderful a thing than to be forced to live a long safe life of conformity. It's about how beautiful his generation is, despite the mess that they've made of themselves, and it's about the immense diversity that comes with living by your own rules. It's a moment where he is the very best that he can be, he's considered the risk to himself, considered running away, considered how he could proceed with his plan, and when his initial execution went wrong, he adapted it, and instead of running away he appealed to the people who he knew and did his level best to bring them back to themselves despite deriving no personal gain from doing so.
On paper? It's a revolutionary, heroic act. However, this isn't the framework through which Nathan understands himself, so even in his moment of selflessness, he celebrates instead the degree to which he is a walking disaster:
"She's got you thinking this is how you're supposed to be? Well it's not! We're young! We are supposed to drink too much! We're supposed to have bad attitudes and shag each others brains out! We are designed to party! This is it! Yeah so a few of us will overdose or go mental, but Charles Darwin said, "you can't make an ommelette without breaking a few eggs", and that's what it's all about: Breaking eggs! And by eggs I do mean getting twatted on a cocktail of class-a's.
If you could just see yourselves, It breaks my heart! You're wearing cardigans! We had it all! We fucked up bigger, and better than any generation that came before us! We were so BEAUTIFUL!
We're screw ups, I'm a screw up, and I plan to be a screw up, until my late twenties, possibly even my early thirties, and I will shag my own mother, before I let her, or anybody else take that away from me!"
This is how Nathan sees his life, his moment of heroism is simultaneously a celebration of being doomed. While there are no two ways about the fact that this is Nathan's last ditch effort to save the free will of his friends, the only way he knows how to address this is to preach the nobility of failure, because this is all he believes he can offer them. With no hope and no future beyond the next big mistake.
History: Unfortunately, since Misfits is a tiny English show of a meager six episodes, the amount of history Nathan is given is not that extensive. The following things we either know, or can extrapolate from the subtext of the series:
Nathan's mother was Irish, his father was English, and judging by his accent he lived in Ireland for a number of years before settling in England.
His father was largely absent in his childhood, and at best seems to have seen him as an unpleasant obligation. Because of this, as a child he developed a strong relationship with his mother, and possibly a touch of an oedipal complex. He certainly became prone to jealousy and manipulative tendencies when it came to his mothers various boyfriends, coming up with excuses and lies to break her up with them to keep her to himself.
Nathan was given an Anti Social Behavior Order (or an ASBO) and issued with a community service sentence, after his bad attitude escalated the relatively minor crime of stealing some sweets from a bowling alley, to destroying some expensive equipment during an escape attempt, to finally firing a nail gun into the back of the hand of the manager of the bowling alley. He was assigned to fulfill his community service sentence alongside a group of other juvenile delinquents, under the guidance of an emotionally strained parole officer.
On the first day of his Community service, there was a huge and mysterious storm, dropping huge clumps of ice from the sky, before a bolt of lightning electrified the delinquents, bestowing them with superpowers, unfortunately, the storm also gave their parole officer a berserk-like rage eventually driving him to try and kill them. Using their newfound gifts, the delinquents fight back and accidentally kill their parole officer, burying him on the bank of a river.
Nathan is kicked out of his home by his mother, who is determined to make it work with her current boyfriend. At first Nathan is extremely resistant, and tries everything from begging his mother, to trying to unmask her boyfriend as a pervert. Nothing works though, and after having sex with an eighty year old woman by accident (as another effect of the storm was to temporarily return to her her youth.), Nathan realized that he didn't want his mother to grow up to be lonely, so he gave her boyfriend his blessing, told them both that he had a flat, and continued to illegally squat in the community center where he was doing his community service.
The Virtue Organization, begins to hypnotize young local people in Nathan's area, into being clean cut right wing Christians. This is done by yet another local who was affected by the storm. As the delinquents begin to be picked off and brainwashed, Nathan and the two surviving members formulate an amazing plan to rescue their lost friends. Basically all this plan entails was wearing headphones to block off the hypnotic voice of the Virtue Organization. The problem with this plan is that the three can no longer hear one another either, and Nathan eventually abandons one of the surviving delinquents: Kelly. Kelly is arguably his best friend of the series, whom he's been nurturing an attraction towards.
The one other surviving delinquent abandons Nathan, for his progressively bad treatment of him. Nathan tries to make contact with Kelly again, only to find her chavvish bad attitude has been toned down into a beige glaze of acceptableness. He tries to convince her that she was better before, and he confesses that he should never have left her. Kelly's too heavily brainwashed to be reached, and, now thoroughly alone? Nathan decides to get the next train out of town and jet the Virtue organization win.
At the very last minute he decides that he can't bring himself to abandon his friends, and instead he formulates a plan to infiltrate the Virtue organization and force them to fix his friends.
It is at this point that Nathan falls through the Arch.
MYSTERIOUSLY FAMILIAR Update: Nathan spent a little bit of time in the woods/barracks, generally being weird and annoying with fellow youthful miscreant Tommy Solomon. There's not much of note that happened, except that the two occasionally beat each other up, bothered/adopted AGENT PETE and went candy corn harvesting around October. And then they wandered off into the woods one day in search of legit magic mushrooms. As far as Nathan's concerned, he and Tommy have only been gone for an hour.
First Person Sample: Hello? Hello? Is anyone out there? Look, this isn't funny! I know that someone must be out there because I think I would remember if I had set off on the kind of acid bender that ends in the middle of the woods with--
[Pause, as he's checking something]
--all right, without some twat managing to come along and lift my Ipod in the mean time. Anyway, my point is, whoever is out there, if you think you're going to play a little Big Brother meets Deliverance with me? Then you've forgotten one important fact:
This is England, you twat! The forests aren't big enough to get lost in for more than ten minutes! And they all have middle aged National Forestry Commission wankers paroling the borders and massaging their genitals while they thank god for the fact that their job consists of wandering through a glorified public park and picking up dog shit and empty crisp packets every day!
So, if you'll excuse me, I'll just be over here looking for that guy.
Prose Sample: All right, so shouting at the trees hadn't solved his problem, and Nathan was sure he'd been walking for more than ten minutes now with no sight of a way out of the woods yet. Although he wasn't inclined to show it yet (because whoever brought him here could well be watching, and he sure as hell didn't want them thinking now would be good time to strike...) he was actually beginning to get a little worried. What if they'd found some remote little pit in the middle of the lake district and he was going to be walking for hours?
Surreptitiously, he slid a hand into his pocket and pulled out his phone, stealing a paranoid glance over his shoulder as he did so. He still couldn't see anyone... but that didn't mean that they weren't there. Turning his attention back to his phone, he checked the signal. Still no bars.
Maybe he could still text? You didn't need a signal to text, did you?
He keyed in the message: "Have been kidnapped and dumped in a forest trace this number + Ill try again later. this is nathan young check my asbo for details x" before sending it to 999. A little symbol came up on his screen to acknowledge that the message was sending, and Nathan mentally congratulated himself for the added detail of the kiss. Who amongst the ugly old cat ladies and desperate queers who populated the emergency services wouldn't appreciate a little text message kiss from him?
Nathan was mentally preening over the idea of an obese, buck toothed lady shedding a tear of happiness over her call center headphones announcing his text message, when his mobile began to emit the obnoxious Nokia ring tune to alert him to the arrival of a new text message.
"Hello Nathan! Don't worry, we're coming to get you now..."
For a minute, he was reassured! The police had got his message they were coming to get him! Only... since when did the emergency services line actually reply to text messages? Was that even possible? Shouldn't it have come from a different number, and shouldn't it have said something about sending a car to his location instead of just... coming to get him? Suddenly Nathan was not at all sure that he wanted to be gotten, so he dealt with the situation in the same mature way that he would have made any other group of people lose interest in trying to help him. Hitting the reply button, he quickly keyed in: "hurry! there's a man here with a giant cock and he looks like he knows how to..." Send. Wait a few seconds. Then type out the punch line, "thanks a lot wankers i just got raped and murdered. stop wasting police time looking for me and go avenge my death. he sounded scottish x"
He hit send, maybe this time the kiss would persuade whatever was out there to take pity on him, and not reply again.
Special Notes: Sorry for god modding The Wood a bit in my sample, I promise not to do that in the actual game. I just was about to put that the reply he got was a "message not sent" notification, and realized that actually getting a reply would probably make for a more interesting sample and give me more to do and my INNER STORYTELLER JUST TOOK OVER, I'M SORRY.
Anyhow, If he gets in then I'll ask mods what happens if/when he tries to text people from The Wood. Because he totally will. :c