Case File: Feel the Rush - Log 1
Oct. 25th, 2024 11:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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xp_logsAshley and Jessie are out at the mutant club, Silver.
Ashley broke from the throng of dancing to head to the bar - her wristband marked her as under 21, but she was going to order a mocktail anyway, even if she hadn't been carded. She took cash out of the tiny little bag velcrod to her wrist, dropped it into the tip jar, and accepted a plastic cup of layered colors, gold and red blending into peach, and a straw and a skewer of fruit. She slurped down a third, wiped her face, adjusted some of the glittery hairclips keeping her bangs up, and then waved one arm frantically "Jessie! Jessie! Over here! Taste this? It has pop rocks!"
"Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?!"
Jessie was at Ashley's side in an instance, excitedly taking a sip of the drink. "Holy shit! That's so cool!" She immediately turned to the bar to order her own.
"Right? I have no idea what's in it, and it's only going to give me a sugar buzz, but it has pop rocks!" Ashley had definitely had a couple of other sugary drinks. "How's your night going? Mine is great, I met a girl, I met another girl, I met a drag queen... " She paused. "Drag... monarch? What's the right word for drag but non binary drag?"
"Generally whatever they want to be called." Jessie got her drink and took a long sip. "Holy shit. I want this stuff to replace my blood."
"Can you do that? Can you make yourself have glitter blood?" Ashley asked. "That would be really cool. I bet you could do glitter skin." She considered this. "I would be so jealous. All the glitter benefits, none of having to remove it from everything forever. Every time I do glitter makeup it's in my pillowcase and hair and I got it in my bra once. My left tit has never forgiven me."
"Glitter blood probably not. I don't think I can change fluids in my body. Glitter skin..." Jessie tilted her head, thinking about it. "Maybe? I had something weird happen to my arm once that I haven't been able to repeat, but I bet I could make it do glitter skin."
"I'm going to propose Drag Monarch. As a general term." Ashley mused, and then returned her attention to Jessie. "Okay, so some lizards look glittery with scales right, so maybe if you did tiny tiny oh wait no!" She bounced on her toes. "Butterfly scales! Tiny tiny tiny ones, they do glitter. Monarch is why I think so, because the butterflies." She was absolutely feeling the sugar buzz from that drink. "You would never need eyeshadow again!"
"Yes!" Jessie took another long sip of her drink. "To Drag Monarch and butterfly scales. I can totally do this."
(Narrator Voice: She could not, in fact, do this.)
"I'm going to work on the skin thing. And get another drink. I think I see one on the menu with jolly ranchers in it!"
Melody and Gabe run into each other at the nightclub bar.
The crowds were large, even for a Friday, but the encroaching chill of the colder months seemed to have that effect. Warmth could be found among the bodies moving to the music.
Melody was one of these pilgrims. It wasn't often she went out anymore, initial thrill of such freedom worn off, but every so often it was nice to relax. She sipped her drink and watched the floor, contemplating going off to dance again.
The bass kept thumping, but the music shifted, the DJ moving from a classic house cut to a rather generic pop song. Gabriel, sweatier than he thought even after shedding a layer somewhere, used that as his cue to step off the dance floor, at least for a bit. He'd originally decided to use Silver as a pregame, an easy precursor to some queer warehouse party where he'd take a pill of some kind in a bid to lose himself for a bit. But it had been a while since he'd been to the mutant nightclub, and he'd been having a better time than he'd expected.
He pushed his way through the crowd, trying to squeeze carefully around a young woman's horns as he moved toward the bar. He winced as his arms, bare in the black tank top he was wearing, scraped against their jagged edges. Then, the drinks in his system having their intended effect, he laughed at the absurdity of the situation, as he zoomed up to the bar, squeezing next to Melody as he tried to get the bartender's attention.
Mel barely startled, pleasant buzz desensitizing her to all sorts of jostling. She regarded the man with brief interest. Was that face familiar? Lots of faces were these days. "Hey!" She called over the thrum of the music. "Do I know you?"
"Dunno. Do you?" He didn't look at her at first, instead leaning over the bar in a practiced way and scanning to see if he knew anyone behind it. His eyes landed on a feline-looking woman who'd been a part of the mutant Pride event he did. She turned, met his gaze and gave him a nod. "Score."
Gabriel turned to look at the person next to him. "You do," he said after a second. "I'm one of your dozens of roommates." That he'd managed to place this given how frequently he was gone these days felt like an achievement, even if he was buzzed enough that he couldn't exactly land on her name. He settled for feigned offense. "Hard to remember that many names and faces, and mine is one of the more generic ones, I guess."
"Ah, fergive me. I reckon I've had a bit already." It was a slight relief that he was from the mansion, and not a Tinder match gone wrong. She could never be too careful with familiar faces in this part of the city. Mel took a sip of her drink to stall as she tried to think of his name. This eluded her, and the silence lingered a little too long, so she instead asked, "You come out like this often?"
The accent was a tell: She had to be one of Sam's family brood. "Often enough," Gabriel responded, feeling a bit smug that he had the upper hand here. "Not always here. There's a lot of New York. A lot of nightlife." He shrugged. "It's Gabriel," he said.
"Fair 'nough, though any is more n' I'm used to." Cumberland County was not particularly known for its after hours scene. The name he so graciously provided did ring bells, though she wasn't sure they had exchanged anything more than passing words. "I'm Mel. I reckon you know my brother?"
"Sure," Gabriel nodded. "Nice guy." He tried to remember what Sam had said about Mel, but it escaped him. The bartender came over, dropping off a double tequila soda with a splash of pineapple juice, waving off Gabriel's attempts to hand her a card. He leaned over the bar, kissing her on the cheek in appreciation. "Fucking wild here tonight," he said, lifting his drink to Mel before taking a sip. Its coolness made him aware how much he'd been sweating. "Kinda nice, though, right? It doesn't always feel this... I dunno." He shrugged. "Communal?"
“S’good way t’put it.” A group of people united under one common goal: to have a good time. Even for one night, a place where mutants and the occasional human could put aside their ideological differences and just breathe. Taking a drink, she asked, “Yer out an’ about a lot then? I don’ see ya ‘round the house much.”
Gabriel nodded, reaching into his back pocket and pulling out a crumpled 10-dollar bill that he unwadded and put on the bar. “Been traveling a lot. Work has been… demanding.” That was sort of true, but only because he’d made it so. “And I spent a lot of time behind bars not going anywhere so I’m sort of riding the wave, or whatever.”
Mel wasn’t particularly moved to ask whether he meant a drinks bar or jail bars. Nothing mattered that much to her a couple drinks in. “Cheers to that. Sometimes I reckon I oughta be doin’ some of the same.”
"Eh." Gabriel took a healthy sip of his drinks. He hadn't realized how hot he'd gotten. "You basically just got here, right? Take your time. New York's a world in itself." He appraised her, not hiding that he was sizing her up. "Everyone's different, but it took me a while to adjust to being here. City like this, where there are things like this?" He wiped a bead of sweat off his forehead as his focus left her and looked onto the dance floor. "Pretty amazing, right?"
Mel followed his gaze out into the crowd. The music, the lights, the movement. At that moment it felt magical to watch. "Yeah, yeah it is."
Content warning: Overdose. A tragic accident occurs.
"Oh, oh, I think it's-! Oh, no." Jessie pouted as she picked off the glitter on her skin. "It's just something that got on me. Really unfair of it to get my hopes up like that." She looked up and ahead at the line in front of them. "At this point I think we'd be better off going out to the alley to-"
She cut herself off abruptly when someone in the women's room started screaming.
"Rude of holy shit." Ashley slapped both hands over her ears, and then released them - it hadn't done any good. "Is that the bathroom? Ugh if this is some drama it better not be. I have to pee." She had drunk so many little fruity mocktails, and so many more bottles of water, the club was -hot- and she'd danced so much.
From his spot near the bar, Gabriel stopped mid-sentence and held up a hand to Mel. Over his time behind bars, he'd learned how to tell shrieks of joy from horrified gay gasps from the sounds that suggested that something was seriously wrong. A scream this loud, that he could hear over the music? "Yeah," he put his drink down, looking around. "That's — that's something bad. Come on." He took off toward the source, not waiting for Mel to follow.
Slightly drunk as she was, Mel heard it as well. She abandoned her drink on the bar and weaved through the crowd after Gabe, trying to keep up with the speedster. It didn't sound good, whatever it was, and her mind helpfully supplied a plethora of scenarios. Spotting the two familiar faces by the bathroom, she called out, "Was that one of y'all? Did y'all hear that?" Mel was disproven a few seconds later as the screaming started up again, even more frantic than before.
Those definitely did not sound like dramatic screams. They sounded scared. The crowd around them had frozen, everyone near them looking for the source of the screaming but no one actually moving to examine it. Jessie saw that Mel was with an adult - like an actual adult, someone who could probably help - and did the only thing that made sense.
"Move your asses!" she yelled as she shouldered through the crowd, pulling Ashley with her and trying to make a path.
The line parted, most not wanting to get involved in whatever was happening, or too drunk to care about being shoved to the side. The door to the bathroom swung open as a group of girls practically ran out.
Behind them the small space contained a troubling scene. A girl with long, dark hair lay on the floor of a stall, seemingly unresponsive, as another girl shrieked in terror, shaking her friend desperately.
'Oh holy shit.' Ashley stared for a moment - and then adrenaline kicked in, there was vomit on the floor, near the girl, her lips were blue - and people were hovering around the door. "Clear the door!" She wasn't even sure who she said it to, but her voice boomed, projecting to the entire crowd with a voice that could fill a theatre. Her theatre tech leader had made them all do the training, because 'there's always one dramatic idiot'. 'Go go go." and she was on her knees, and rolling the prone young woman onto her side. "She's breathing." Barely. "You.' She pointed at the nearest person, the first one peeking into the door. "Get the bartender, see if there's a narcan kit!"
That was Jessie. She practically tripped over herself as she tried to run back to the bar, where the bartender was already on the phone with 911. "Hey, hey! Do you have a narcan kit?"
"Huh?"
"Narcan kit!" Jessie didn't really mean to yell, but if ever a situation called for a loud voice, it was this one. "There's a girl OD-ing in the bathroom!"
He pulled a small kit out from under the counter, practically throwing it at Jessie. She caught it and ran back to the bathroom, dropping to her knees beside Ashley. "Bartenders calling an ambulance now."
Ashley's fingers only felt wrong for a moment and then she had the little plastic wrapper open and the nozzle in the girls' nose. It was the easy one, no syringes to fumble with - or to have to order someone else to use. "Timer. Two minutes." She barked, and hit the plunger on the narcan nozzle. "She's going to wake up -pissed off or confused."
After a few moments the girl did wake up, eyes flashing open in an alarmed kind of way. She hadn’t been breathing much before, but now her chest began to make this awful rattling noise.
Over on the bathroom counter the small decorative plant started to move. It was hardly any time before it was taking over the entire counter, and showing no signs of stopping. Mel jumped when it tried to grab onto her arm. “Holy shi- who’s doin’ that?”
"Oh, will you fucking — I'm fucking gay." Impatient, Gabriel used his powers to shove his way past those who objected to a man in the women's room. Then, he surveyed the scene, his eyes growing a bit wide. Everyone's attention was on the girl who was apparently overdosing, and so he looked to her friend, who was standing back, still looking terrified. "Hey, hey, hey. Take a breath." He put an arm on her shoulder, sort of to steady her, but he was really in no mood to calm her down. "What happened? Can't help her unless we know."
Veronica felt lightheaded, her heart rabbiting in her chest as she watched Karly on the floor, feeling helpless. “I don’t- she-“ She seemed to take in that Gabe was a dude first, and that he was an older dude second. A second type of terror came over her: the fear of potential repercussions. “I don’t know.”
"You do know," he said, a bit softer, deciding to switch gears. "I am a bartender. I've taken my fair share of pills. I've seen a lot of this shit and—" His eyes went to Mel, swatting away living flora. "And, uh..." He lost his train of thought.
Jessie had her phone out for Ashley's timer, but she switched to the camera to record the growing plant. It wasn't really a conscious choice, just see something, record something. "What... What do we do now?"
Mel saw that the girl was turning paler, a greenish blue tint coming over her skin. She wasn't sure that she had much time left. As she passed Gabe and the friend, she felt something hit her purse, but ignored it for the time being.
Going into big sister mode, she dropped to her knees next to Ashley, wanting to shield the two girls from what she figured was going to happen now. "You need a break hon'. How abouts you two go outside to flag down the paramedics when they arrive? I can take over from here." She opened the kit and pulled out another dose of Narcan, ready to administer it as a last resort. "I'll keep time and do some rescue breathin' if she needs it."
"I can't do compressions." Ashley said. "I'll do more than break ribs." But she didn't get up, she had one hand on the girl's shoulder and slid a hand under her head. "But if she gets a seizure I can keep her from cracking her skull open." The girl's head, hair sticky with sweat and floor residue - and maybe vomit - felt small and fragile atop her open palm. "Or from biting her tongue off." She wasn't sure she could stand and leave now, she couldn't bring herself to turn her back and just leave while all this was happening. What would people think? "I'll count time, you CPR."
“Alright.” Mel twisted her hair back and leaned over the girl’s chest. “Starting now.”
Ashley broke from the throng of dancing to head to the bar - her wristband marked her as under 21, but she was going to order a mocktail anyway, even if she hadn't been carded. She took cash out of the tiny little bag velcrod to her wrist, dropped it into the tip jar, and accepted a plastic cup of layered colors, gold and red blending into peach, and a straw and a skewer of fruit. She slurped down a third, wiped her face, adjusted some of the glittery hairclips keeping her bangs up, and then waved one arm frantically "Jessie! Jessie! Over here! Taste this? It has pop rocks!"
"Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?!"
Jessie was at Ashley's side in an instance, excitedly taking a sip of the drink. "Holy shit! That's so cool!" She immediately turned to the bar to order her own.
"Right? I have no idea what's in it, and it's only going to give me a sugar buzz, but it has pop rocks!" Ashley had definitely had a couple of other sugary drinks. "How's your night going? Mine is great, I met a girl, I met another girl, I met a drag queen... " She paused. "Drag... monarch? What's the right word for drag but non binary drag?"
"Generally whatever they want to be called." Jessie got her drink and took a long sip. "Holy shit. I want this stuff to replace my blood."
"Can you do that? Can you make yourself have glitter blood?" Ashley asked. "That would be really cool. I bet you could do glitter skin." She considered this. "I would be so jealous. All the glitter benefits, none of having to remove it from everything forever. Every time I do glitter makeup it's in my pillowcase and hair and I got it in my bra once. My left tit has never forgiven me."
"Glitter blood probably not. I don't think I can change fluids in my body. Glitter skin..." Jessie tilted her head, thinking about it. "Maybe? I had something weird happen to my arm once that I haven't been able to repeat, but I bet I could make it do glitter skin."
"I'm going to propose Drag Monarch. As a general term." Ashley mused, and then returned her attention to Jessie. "Okay, so some lizards look glittery with scales right, so maybe if you did tiny tiny oh wait no!" She bounced on her toes. "Butterfly scales! Tiny tiny tiny ones, they do glitter. Monarch is why I think so, because the butterflies." She was absolutely feeling the sugar buzz from that drink. "You would never need eyeshadow again!"
"Yes!" Jessie took another long sip of her drink. "To Drag Monarch and butterfly scales. I can totally do this."
(Narrator Voice: She could not, in fact, do this.)
"I'm going to work on the skin thing. And get another drink. I think I see one on the menu with jolly ranchers in it!"
Melody and Gabe run into each other at the nightclub bar.
The crowds were large, even for a Friday, but the encroaching chill of the colder months seemed to have that effect. Warmth could be found among the bodies moving to the music.
Melody was one of these pilgrims. It wasn't often she went out anymore, initial thrill of such freedom worn off, but every so often it was nice to relax. She sipped her drink and watched the floor, contemplating going off to dance again.
The bass kept thumping, but the music shifted, the DJ moving from a classic house cut to a rather generic pop song. Gabriel, sweatier than he thought even after shedding a layer somewhere, used that as his cue to step off the dance floor, at least for a bit. He'd originally decided to use Silver as a pregame, an easy precursor to some queer warehouse party where he'd take a pill of some kind in a bid to lose himself for a bit. But it had been a while since he'd been to the mutant nightclub, and he'd been having a better time than he'd expected.
He pushed his way through the crowd, trying to squeeze carefully around a young woman's horns as he moved toward the bar. He winced as his arms, bare in the black tank top he was wearing, scraped against their jagged edges. Then, the drinks in his system having their intended effect, he laughed at the absurdity of the situation, as he zoomed up to the bar, squeezing next to Melody as he tried to get the bartender's attention.
Mel barely startled, pleasant buzz desensitizing her to all sorts of jostling. She regarded the man with brief interest. Was that face familiar? Lots of faces were these days. "Hey!" She called over the thrum of the music. "Do I know you?"
"Dunno. Do you?" He didn't look at her at first, instead leaning over the bar in a practiced way and scanning to see if he knew anyone behind it. His eyes landed on a feline-looking woman who'd been a part of the mutant Pride event he did. She turned, met his gaze and gave him a nod. "Score."
Gabriel turned to look at the person next to him. "You do," he said after a second. "I'm one of your dozens of roommates." That he'd managed to place this given how frequently he was gone these days felt like an achievement, even if he was buzzed enough that he couldn't exactly land on her name. He settled for feigned offense. "Hard to remember that many names and faces, and mine is one of the more generic ones, I guess."
"Ah, fergive me. I reckon I've had a bit already." It was a slight relief that he was from the mansion, and not a Tinder match gone wrong. She could never be too careful with familiar faces in this part of the city. Mel took a sip of her drink to stall as she tried to think of his name. This eluded her, and the silence lingered a little too long, so she instead asked, "You come out like this often?"
The accent was a tell: She had to be one of Sam's family brood. "Often enough," Gabriel responded, feeling a bit smug that he had the upper hand here. "Not always here. There's a lot of New York. A lot of nightlife." He shrugged. "It's Gabriel," he said.
"Fair 'nough, though any is more n' I'm used to." Cumberland County was not particularly known for its after hours scene. The name he so graciously provided did ring bells, though she wasn't sure they had exchanged anything more than passing words. "I'm Mel. I reckon you know my brother?"
"Sure," Gabriel nodded. "Nice guy." He tried to remember what Sam had said about Mel, but it escaped him. The bartender came over, dropping off a double tequila soda with a splash of pineapple juice, waving off Gabriel's attempts to hand her a card. He leaned over the bar, kissing her on the cheek in appreciation. "Fucking wild here tonight," he said, lifting his drink to Mel before taking a sip. Its coolness made him aware how much he'd been sweating. "Kinda nice, though, right? It doesn't always feel this... I dunno." He shrugged. "Communal?"
“S’good way t’put it.” A group of people united under one common goal: to have a good time. Even for one night, a place where mutants and the occasional human could put aside their ideological differences and just breathe. Taking a drink, she asked, “Yer out an’ about a lot then? I don’ see ya ‘round the house much.”
Gabriel nodded, reaching into his back pocket and pulling out a crumpled 10-dollar bill that he unwadded and put on the bar. “Been traveling a lot. Work has been… demanding.” That was sort of true, but only because he’d made it so. “And I spent a lot of time behind bars not going anywhere so I’m sort of riding the wave, or whatever.”
Mel wasn’t particularly moved to ask whether he meant a drinks bar or jail bars. Nothing mattered that much to her a couple drinks in. “Cheers to that. Sometimes I reckon I oughta be doin’ some of the same.”
"Eh." Gabriel took a healthy sip of his drinks. He hadn't realized how hot he'd gotten. "You basically just got here, right? Take your time. New York's a world in itself." He appraised her, not hiding that he was sizing her up. "Everyone's different, but it took me a while to adjust to being here. City like this, where there are things like this?" He wiped a bead of sweat off his forehead as his focus left her and looked onto the dance floor. "Pretty amazing, right?"
Mel followed his gaze out into the crowd. The music, the lights, the movement. At that moment it felt magical to watch. "Yeah, yeah it is."
Content warning: Overdose. A tragic accident occurs.
"Oh, oh, I think it's-! Oh, no." Jessie pouted as she picked off the glitter on her skin. "It's just something that got on me. Really unfair of it to get my hopes up like that." She looked up and ahead at the line in front of them. "At this point I think we'd be better off going out to the alley to-"
She cut herself off abruptly when someone in the women's room started screaming.
"Rude of holy shit." Ashley slapped both hands over her ears, and then released them - it hadn't done any good. "Is that the bathroom? Ugh if this is some drama it better not be. I have to pee." She had drunk so many little fruity mocktails, and so many more bottles of water, the club was -hot- and she'd danced so much.
From his spot near the bar, Gabriel stopped mid-sentence and held up a hand to Mel. Over his time behind bars, he'd learned how to tell shrieks of joy from horrified gay gasps from the sounds that suggested that something was seriously wrong. A scream this loud, that he could hear over the music? "Yeah," he put his drink down, looking around. "That's — that's something bad. Come on." He took off toward the source, not waiting for Mel to follow.
Slightly drunk as she was, Mel heard it as well. She abandoned her drink on the bar and weaved through the crowd after Gabe, trying to keep up with the speedster. It didn't sound good, whatever it was, and her mind helpfully supplied a plethora of scenarios. Spotting the two familiar faces by the bathroom, she called out, "Was that one of y'all? Did y'all hear that?" Mel was disproven a few seconds later as the screaming started up again, even more frantic than before.
Those definitely did not sound like dramatic screams. They sounded scared. The crowd around them had frozen, everyone near them looking for the source of the screaming but no one actually moving to examine it. Jessie saw that Mel was with an adult - like an actual adult, someone who could probably help - and did the only thing that made sense.
"Move your asses!" she yelled as she shouldered through the crowd, pulling Ashley with her and trying to make a path.
The line parted, most not wanting to get involved in whatever was happening, or too drunk to care about being shoved to the side. The door to the bathroom swung open as a group of girls practically ran out.
Behind them the small space contained a troubling scene. A girl with long, dark hair lay on the floor of a stall, seemingly unresponsive, as another girl shrieked in terror, shaking her friend desperately.
'Oh holy shit.' Ashley stared for a moment - and then adrenaline kicked in, there was vomit on the floor, near the girl, her lips were blue - and people were hovering around the door. "Clear the door!" She wasn't even sure who she said it to, but her voice boomed, projecting to the entire crowd with a voice that could fill a theatre. Her theatre tech leader had made them all do the training, because 'there's always one dramatic idiot'. 'Go go go." and she was on her knees, and rolling the prone young woman onto her side. "She's breathing." Barely. "You.' She pointed at the nearest person, the first one peeking into the door. "Get the bartender, see if there's a narcan kit!"
That was Jessie. She practically tripped over herself as she tried to run back to the bar, where the bartender was already on the phone with 911. "Hey, hey! Do you have a narcan kit?"
"Huh?"
"Narcan kit!" Jessie didn't really mean to yell, but if ever a situation called for a loud voice, it was this one. "There's a girl OD-ing in the bathroom!"
He pulled a small kit out from under the counter, practically throwing it at Jessie. She caught it and ran back to the bathroom, dropping to her knees beside Ashley. "Bartenders calling an ambulance now."
Ashley's fingers only felt wrong for a moment and then she had the little plastic wrapper open and the nozzle in the girls' nose. It was the easy one, no syringes to fumble with - or to have to order someone else to use. "Timer. Two minutes." She barked, and hit the plunger on the narcan nozzle. "She's going to wake up -pissed off or confused."
After a few moments the girl did wake up, eyes flashing open in an alarmed kind of way. She hadn’t been breathing much before, but now her chest began to make this awful rattling noise.
Over on the bathroom counter the small decorative plant started to move. It was hardly any time before it was taking over the entire counter, and showing no signs of stopping. Mel jumped when it tried to grab onto her arm. “Holy shi- who’s doin’ that?”
"Oh, will you fucking — I'm fucking gay." Impatient, Gabriel used his powers to shove his way past those who objected to a man in the women's room. Then, he surveyed the scene, his eyes growing a bit wide. Everyone's attention was on the girl who was apparently overdosing, and so he looked to her friend, who was standing back, still looking terrified. "Hey, hey, hey. Take a breath." He put an arm on her shoulder, sort of to steady her, but he was really in no mood to calm her down. "What happened? Can't help her unless we know."
Veronica felt lightheaded, her heart rabbiting in her chest as she watched Karly on the floor, feeling helpless. “I don’t- she-“ She seemed to take in that Gabe was a dude first, and that he was an older dude second. A second type of terror came over her: the fear of potential repercussions. “I don’t know.”
"You do know," he said, a bit softer, deciding to switch gears. "I am a bartender. I've taken my fair share of pills. I've seen a lot of this shit and—" His eyes went to Mel, swatting away living flora. "And, uh..." He lost his train of thought.
Jessie had her phone out for Ashley's timer, but she switched to the camera to record the growing plant. It wasn't really a conscious choice, just see something, record something. "What... What do we do now?"
Mel saw that the girl was turning paler, a greenish blue tint coming over her skin. She wasn't sure that she had much time left. As she passed Gabe and the friend, she felt something hit her purse, but ignored it for the time being.
Going into big sister mode, she dropped to her knees next to Ashley, wanting to shield the two girls from what she figured was going to happen now. "You need a break hon'. How abouts you two go outside to flag down the paramedics when they arrive? I can take over from here." She opened the kit and pulled out another dose of Narcan, ready to administer it as a last resort. "I'll keep time and do some rescue breathin' if she needs it."
"I can't do compressions." Ashley said. "I'll do more than break ribs." But she didn't get up, she had one hand on the girl's shoulder and slid a hand under her head. "But if she gets a seizure I can keep her from cracking her skull open." The girl's head, hair sticky with sweat and floor residue - and maybe vomit - felt small and fragile atop her open palm. "Or from biting her tongue off." She wasn't sure she could stand and leave now, she couldn't bring herself to turn her back and just leave while all this was happening. What would people think? "I'll count time, you CPR."
“Alright.” Mel twisted her hair back and leaned over the girl’s chest. “Starting now.”
