[ Billions of Marcus's braincells have been flash-fried. The bottle of ether Billy stashed in the glovebox, the eight balls of cocaine that kept him focused on the drive, the stale swill of backwash and alcohol from cans and flasks that didn't sit well together - he burned himself out hard over these past few hours, and that started long before the acid hit. The fucking acid.

Seven tabs, taken all at once out of some lonely, clingy, toxic, masculine bravado. He slammed that shit back to show his friends that he could handle anything, to prove that he was tough and unbreakable and knew his way around the sour smelling, free love, mite-infested underbelly of Las Vegas, and it's making his arrival to Duplicity a living hell. The world is a bleeding, terrifying tornado of hallucinations and fractured memories. He hears sounds on ten-second delays, he watches people talk before they've even opened their mouths. He remembers killing his friend's dad, and he remembers staring at blood on his hands and sweating cold bullets as the cop in front of him asked him questions he couldn't parse, and he remembers closing his eyes and opening them again to find himself hearing words like Dominant and Submissive and LIES blending into the interrogation and not making any sense. He sees the world explode into animated colour and gridwork displays of unfollowable digital patterns.

He still thinks he's in Vegas while he's processed by LIES, and he thinks the walking tour of the city is some kind of police escort taking him in for an arrest or further questioning. He's making everyone on the tour uncomfortable, babbling to himself about inescapable mountains and 8 foot tall clowns made of neon light in panicked, hushed breaths, and the wide, open, dilated eyes, the violent shaking of his body and the way he pukes in a bush is probably a big enough clue that he's high as hell. He's barefoot in a paper gown, probably getting frostbite without realizing it, and the spooked, startled little faces he makes seem to come from nowhere. He doesn't even know who he's talking to or where he is when he opens his mouth again - he's just glad words come out instead of vomit. ]

You'll-- you'll let me know when they're back, yeah? My-- my hands? I-- I think someone's taken my hands.

[ Marcus tries grabbing at the air in front of his hands, which he thinks is where his hands should be. Fuck, did he leave them back home? Fuck, fuck, fuck, he doesn't know how to reattach hands. He's fucked. ]

[ Marcus is still pretty fucked up by the time they get to the gallery. He's not curled up under a bench and panicking about falling from the top of buildings he's nowhere near like he was on the tour, but he does have a minor anxiety spike when he sees some chick's face covered in cum and misinterprets the visual signals enough to think that her skin is sloughing off of her bones like a melting candle. There's a sub tied to a chair and all he can do is mumble that's an albino god on a throne of doll-heads to himself in a hushed, awed tone, and he gets a little scared of the glory holes when he sees them undulate and whirr like garbage disposals.

But he manages to maintain some sense of sobriety half-way through the tour. He's still putting priority on the wrong things in his head - he worries that he's forgotten how he's supposed to act in art galleries, and he's scared that the artist who tied all these naked people up thinks he's an asshole for not tracking them down and complimenting them on their work - but the hallucinations ebb a bit and he returns to a mostly conscious state of confused light-headedness. He's probably spoken to whoever he's addressing next to him a dozen times before now, but now's the time it really counts. This is the conversation he'll actually remember. ]

Hey, uh - can you tell me where we are? I wanna... I gotta go home.

[ He's sweating bullets, eyes half-lidded like he's forgotten how to blink and this is the best he can do. He runs his hand back through the curls of his hair, clenching his teeth and flexing his jawline. He's gotta get back to all the people waiting for him and apologize for being such a screw up. There's gotta be a payphone around here somewhere, right? ]

[ Enough time has passed for Marcus to have a decent, sober handle on where he is and what Duplicity expects of him, but he hasn't exactly been in a rush to whip out his dick and waggle it at the first person willing to help him out with his quota. He's been stewing in his usual misanthropic headspace, dodging people and feeling embarrassed about the trip he was on when he first arrived. He's better now, but jesus, what a day that was.

He's not on the ice rink, but he's just outside of it, sitting on the bank of a manicured hill a decent ways away from the fence and even further from the rec building attached to it. He's in the warmest clothes a sub with no money can find, and whatever he's wearing is probably far too thin for him to have his bony ass sitting on the ground like this, but he's got a scrap of paper and a cheap, chipped pencil in his hand, and being able to draw or write while judging people from an anti-social distance makes him feel safe and comfortable. He arrived with his journal, and he'd love to be writing in that instead of on the loose sheet he found in the gutter, but - well, he lost that somewhere on the tour. He'd kill to be able to find it again. ]

Everyone here is out of their minds.

[ As anti-social as he is, however, he's actually pretty happy for the company. He nods towards the patch of grass next to him, inviting whoever's here with him to come sit down. ]

I've seen two different couples trying to fuck each other on skates. Dangerous as hell. Someone's bound to get a concussion soon.

un: acidking
what's the music scene like here? or... the comic book scene? the art scene in general?
i'm getting the feeling there's no real culture in duplicity. just hollow displays of sex designed to keep you from thinking freely. which, granted, isn't all that different from where i came from, but -
there has to be something to do here other than fuck strangers. right?

[ ota. marcus is 16/17 if you want to opt out. pm if you wanna plan anything out! ]