Cen's Sadfaic is slightly bigger than mine- Round 9 1/2 Preperations
The broom closet was dimly lit. Light beamed in through the hole which was likely to be considered a "window" in the upper right corner. There was only a bit of light coming in from the square porthole. The light directly hit Thoad on his abdomen and his arms. Brooms, mops and buckets were all piled up in a corner, with a wooden chair by the bed. Despite being a broom closet filled with cleaning supplies, the room smelt like doctors office, rather than a cleaning supply.
Thoad drowsily awoke from a nap. He hadn't had any visitors for a while, and he was a little sad by it. "Man, I'm not SPESHUL enough to get visitors, huh?" He asked himself, not accounting the fact that people could probably still hear him. The broom-closet-kateer remembered that he woke up just a few hours ago. He wonders how he had gotten here, and what had happened. "Oh yeah! The round... D*mnit I forgot if I won..." he mused.
Just then, Strop came in in his doctors outfit. He gave a courteous hello and sat on the wooden chair that was next to Thoad's hospital bed. Thoad said hello back and stared up at the ceiling. A nice white-gray with cracks in it. This broom closet had class.
"So, Strop, I have a few questions for a Doctor like yourself," Thoad started to talk. "I seem to feel my brains. I'm 99% sure that this is not normal. What happened?" he asked. A dim smile spread across his face. He was focused on the now, and not the past.
"Well, half of your skull is in a freezer. We had to drain-" Strop was cut off by Thoad.
"So half of my head is in the fridge?" Thoad asked calmly. He was so tired from being still for so long. His physical capacity must have dropped quite a bit.
"Uh... yeah, kind of," Strop said to him.
"Right then. It also feels like there's a stick up my wiener. What have you been doing you sick little pony?" Thoad continued to question Strop.
Strop had a blank, Cen-like face when Thoad made his remark. "There's a tube up your wee-wee, Thoad. It was needed. We need to keep a close monitor on you after all," Strop explained the reason for the wee-wee tube in depth. Thoad had heard it from his mother (who was a nurse), but had simply forgot.
Thoad coughed, trying to be melodramatic. As if the bed he was lying in what was going to be his deathbed. This, of course, wasn't true. Though the injuries were severe, they weren't fatal. Or rather, they would have been fatal if Strop didn't interject like he did. Thoad and Strop had just sat (or in Thoad's case, lied) there for a few more minutes. The awkwardness of it all started to hit Thoad.
Strop was the one to break the silence. "So Thoad. What exactly do you remember of the last round?" he asked. Thoad lied there for a minute and thought exactly what he DID remember. Bits and pieces, gists, just certain things.
"Oh man, I can barely even remember, I don't even know where to begin," Thoad said, his face bemused.
Strop told Thoad in a serious tone, "Start from the beginning Thoad, C'mon."
"Fine fine, we were all in the ballroom. It was the great ballroom of ArmorCastle... oh how much I'd love to live there-" Thoad realized he was starting to go off track, "And you jumped us all with a, 'OKAI NAO YOO GAIZ FIGHT NOW LOLOL', and so we did. I remember doing a somersault backflip to Crimsonblade, and then asking him to join me in my epic battle to defeat Frank and Leon as I smoked a cigar, but he declined, saying I was too awesome to be his partner. So I scoffed at him and went with frank..." Thoad felt a pain in his brain. It was odd having a headache with no scalp. Like, really odd.
Strop only said "mhmm" to Thoad, despite Thoad doing a half-diss on him. "So then, I remember a hyena. The cheapest *****ing hyena I ever dun saw. I think it was Leon's.. yeah, I'm almost certain it was. Leon hid somewhere while his hyena ripped me to shreds. I... I think I ended up shooting him in the head... wait, no, it survived. I'm not sure. Well, one way or another, leon was out. That just left-" Thoad's head was hurting. He didn't want to think at the second, just rest. But, he felt speshul because Strop wanted to see him, so he continued anyway, "Then there was crimson. He made a huge bunny thing. It was really tough..." Thoad continued after a minute, "And then crimson came after me and... I think I won? Or..." Thoad's eyes began to widen. "I.. I didn't win. I didn't win at all. I lost..."
Thoad began to form tears. He was about to sob, when he realized something. "Wait! No, I didn't lose! The round is still going, right? I never said I surrender!" Thoad had the tone of desperation in his voice. He wanted to be in denial, but his skeptic mind wouldn't let him.
Strop had to make sure that Thoad would get through grief as fast as possible, and told him, "No, Thoad. You lost. Besides, even if the round was still going, it would be Crimson here, putting his blade to your throat telling you to surrender. You lost." This only brought Thoad to a more crushing position. Strop, the closest thing he had to a father figure, had just told him that he had lost. Thoad interpreted it as "You'll never be a mod.".
Thoad was filled with panic and fear. He can't think straight, he doesn't even remember that there was a tube up his pee-hole and that half of his skull was in the fridge. He starts to go into a meltdown. Thoad raised his left arm (the good one) and dropped it down onto his bed, making a thump. He muttered "D*mmit" every time he does this. The thumping turned to pounding, and he began to raise his voice. The pounding eventually grows to a point where someone in the other room could here. Suddenly, Thoad made a fist and punched the concrete wall next to him, yelling "D*MMIT!" while doing so. The tears still ran down his face as his rage doesn't allow him to feel the pain and possible damage he had done to himself... and the wall, which was developing a few new cracks.
Strop, seeing that this might get out of hand, held Thoad's arms down, as Thoad yelled expletives and carried on through his meltdown. He was in a trance-like state, not caring about the now, the future, only focusing that he lost, and that he thought he'd never become a mod. He had thought- no, he knew- that this was his only chance. The only chance in which me might finally reach his goal. The goal he had dreamt of ever since he began being a regular in the ArmorGames forums.
Thoad eventually began to calm down, though he never stopped crying. He just wanted to sit there and cry. He felt like running away from the scene, like an angsty teen would do. Thankfully, due to a couple of years of zombie survival, he manages to calm down. His arms are still shaking, but Strop felt he could let go. The green clad teen closed his eyes, and frowned. He started to snivel a bit. "Do you know why the Way of Moderation was going to be the only sure-fire way to get me into mod-dom? Do you, Strop?" Thoad asked, his eyes shimmering with tears.
Strop had an idea why, but he felt that he shouldn't say it. Instead, he simply said, "No, Thoad, I don't."
Thoad then explained, whilst staring up at the concrete ceiling. He began with a small sob, "So you don't know why I am an immature little prick, eh? I figured you would have known." Thoad was thinking of Emo music while he spoke, "I hate my life, Strop. I have no future, I hate the people around me. I'm a perverted *sshole who will die alone. I know I will. I..." Thoad was having a tiny bit of trouble opening up, "I know that the only way I could possibly stand life, was to make myself something I wasn't. I am still a perverted *******, but I do my best to be happy." Thoad pointed down to the LoLWhut logo on his shirt. "See this, Strop? It's the epitome of what I want to be, what I am at this moment. Borderline insane, overloaded with happy. Yet I am homocidal, or even suicidal. I use my immaturity to cover up the life I hate."
Thoad was calming down, going into a semi-depressed, semi-apathetic state of mind. "I don't want to be here. On earth, I mean. I don't want anything to do with it. But I'm stuck. So I try to cover up my hatred for myself and the earth with this," Thoad tapped at the logo of LoLWhut Inc. on his shirt. He looks at strop, directly in the eyes. He tries to have a connecting moment with him, though he couldn't tell if it worked or not. "And now, now that the Moderation Wheel will be up after this, and now that the Way of Moderation is nearing it's closing moments..." Thoad put his left arm up to his eyes, and wiped off the tears.
"It's crushed me, Strop. I haven't felt this bad since... I haven't had a punch to the soul since..." Thoad looked back on his life in AG, trying to remember. "I haven't had a punch to the soul since Zophia became a mod. I'm not sure if I showed it to you and Zoph and Cen, but I was crushed. I was depressed for about a week," Thoad stopped and took a long breathe. "I couldn't stop thinking about it. The person I had considered my rival had beaten me to my dream. My own dream, Strop. " Thoad took a gulp and continued on with his monologue. "Has that ever happened to you, Strop? I've been shot down by women, I've been hit by my own mother, my father has insulted me and called me names, as well as told me I'm worthless... but this. The loss, the crushing of my heart... It was just as bad, if not worse."
So that's why I can't be a mod. It hurts me, Strop. It really does. I don't think life will ever get better for me, so I'll be stuck. I'll be stuck in this form of hate and self-loathing for ever," Thoad ended his monologue. The next 20 minutes felt like an eternity of waiting. The green clad zombie slayer wasn't crying as much, and was in a pure apathetic state. He wanted to leave. He wanted to go away, find a tree to sit under, and grow up. He had known that he couldn't. It would have just been an immature and wussy move to begin with.
Strop took a deep breathe in, hearing Thoad's sad story. He didn't announce any of his own thoughts about what Thoad said, and simply asked, "Thoad, what exactly do you think the Way of Moderation is?"
Thoad didn't even think about a higher meaning to the question, and said, "The Way of Moderation... The tournament itself is an overly long and overly complicated series of tests in order to find out who is suitable for moderating the forums, right?" Thoad didn't wait for an answer and went ot the next subject, "As for what the actual Way of Moderation, the code by which a moderator goes by, I would say it's to uphold the law of the forums, to make sure people aren't doing anything outside of what they should be, and most of all..." Thoad made a pause for a moment to recollect exactly why he wanted to be a mod, "to make the site a better and more fun place for all. The exact thing I dreamt of since I came on the forums... to make AG a better place."
Strop made a cryptic remark after Thoad's speech. He did a horse-huff (OOC: You know, that thing where the horse is like "HUFF") just before he began, "You'll know what it is when you know what it is." Thoad gave strop a slight scowl, making it clear to him that he thought that was a cop-out answer.
Strop had to remark on Thoad's performance so far, "You know, Thoad. I'm pretty impressed that you made it this far," Strop's voice wasn't monotone, but it wasn't exactly full of emotion, either. It was something of a respectful tone. "In fact, I"m impressed that you're alive right now. Your tenacity seems to get in front of your patience," Strop paused, to think about what he'd say, "but, I think that that will end up getting a lot better as you grow older." Thoad was slightly cheered up by being admired by Strop, but he was still incredibly depressed.
Strop felt that this moment needed a mood lightener desperately, so he mentioned something. He pointed at Thoad's right arm, which was full of metal pins. "By the way, that arm with all the metal pins in it, it's going to need physiotherapy."
Thoad looked at Strop with a blank face, "You mean physical therapy? What should I be doing, doctor?"
Strop made a small smile under his mask, "You'll probably need to vigorously work it three times a day for several weeks."
Thoad smiled himself, "You realize that you're talking to someone who is 'bigger' than you, and manages to shoot kittens, right?"
Strop made a Cen trademarked T T face, and monotonously said: "I'm a horse, Thoad, we've been over this before."
