Description: Varvara Economou once prided herself - to an extent - for being willing to go so far to make herself strong enough to earn a living with her own two hands the only way she knew how, as a gross overreaction to standards of beauty being sullied. She learned, eventually, at the brink of death that this was no way to live... and now, against her choice thanks to injuries inflicted during what was the turnaround point of her life, she will have to learn to put her trust in other people while she rests on the sidelines.
Everything was out of the hands of the thuggish Greek-Cypirot wrestler.
Even at her best - what little of it could be considered good - she rarely ever was able to lay more than a grime-filled hand on anything.
There was simultaneous relief and dread when Tabitha took the sphere with her. The overwhelming calm - upstaged and challenged only in the presence of Duke's vulgar displays of power - left her. She hated that thing, and yet it was something of a security blanket.
It invited her into complacency, to rest, after having suffered that savage beating by the mysterious martial artist that guarded the sphere at the heart of Metro City's abhorrent, record-breaking storm weather.
All her unnaturally developed musculature meant nothing against the fists, feet, and fury of a truly dedicated master that went far beyond the desire for material comfort and stability. The sphere that empowered the weak and humbled the strong in its wake may be the very reason she was not torn in two.
Instead it has left a largely crumpled, single whole that is now bedridden in a refugee camp that is overpopulated, understaffed, and at the brink of patience and kindness of those who no longer have the funding to keep supporting this thanks to the nearly total economic collapse. Before long, this shelter may become another lawless slum unto itself.
Vulnerable. Weak. How she cursed this situation from the very core of her being. She should have left Tabitha to be killed out in the ocean instead of sticking her neck out. Look where it got her! The aggression from chemical imbalances of her habitual abuse of performance enhancers long subsided in withdrawal, to be replaced by a more pure, despair-fueled fury.
She never got to see or say much of anything to the young man with the other one when she was inexplicably drawn to push herself up the construct of the mad Duke, given strength only from the proximity of the truly mighty to keep her walking. To date, she may not have been aware that the man she saw who would declare himself king of the new Metro City was a previous employer. It was all a blur, a fortunate happenstance for the young man with the strange hand that would claim that sphere.
Good riddance. She never wanted to see them again, even as a part of her soul pined for those whispers that invited her to rest, to not worry or be afraid any longer.
Though she was still stronger than most of the other refugees in their tightly-packed and barely organized rows of beds, she could not look upon any of them with a degree of trust. Any moment, she feared, she'd be taken advantage of. Not that there was much good about her - all she ever had going was her ability to fight, and even that never carried her far.
She wasn't smart. She wasn't kind. She wasn't hard-working. She wasn't considerate. Most of all, she wasn't pretty, thanks in part - no, entirely - to scars inflicted in her youth, and she reasoned nobody ever would want her after her father's overt lament upon such a thing. She had long stopped caring for her appearance after that point, and the aftereffects of so much steroid abuse and a myriad of scars (that are somehow symmetrical) speaks for itself.
Now, she was just as much the same as anyone else around her. Broken, battered, penniless, and with nothing to look forward to as she pained herself to sit up in her bed and wrap her hands around raised legs, head on chin.
Unlike most of them, she could look out into the window and see the raindrops noisily splatter against the fogged, dirty glass. She could not see beyond the rainstorm that has promised to grow ever stronger again yet. Alarmists are already proclaiming that this next storm is going to eat up an even larger area of the northeastern United States.
Here she is, then, left here as Tabitha ran off and abandoned her... she scowled at how following her put her in this state, with nothing she can do but wait for the next time she struggles to fend for herself. These refugees are almost as good as written off by their caretakers, as there are far too many displaced people and too few supplies or space to care for them at all.
...
Yet, when Tabitha and that other young man left, there was a certain purpose to them. They had to. Something compelled them, just as something compelled her to make the journey up that false tower when she was told to hold onto the sphere for a while.
Where are they going, she wonders to herself. What are they doing? Is it something people will thank them for? Will they pay them lots of money? People who save the world or something make a lot of money, right? Materialism and greed take root in her thoughts almost immediately.
...
Will she bring back some for me? She was the only one to really show me any kindness.
Her facial expression dims in sadness, and somehow catches herself in angry blame games. She'll be back for me, right? She'll be back for just about everyone in Metro City - virtually no one cared for it as much as her, given how she was willing to fight for that city to the end.
She's not going to die out there in vain, whatever she's doing. She'll fix all this, right? She'll come back with like six turkey meals or something. She could go for six turkey meals right now, the barely adequate rations having hardly satiated her.
She wasn't a spiritual woman. The idea of prayer was beyond her, at least to her recognition. She didn't pray to any supposed religious figure. She didn't consider it praying of that sort, but that was exactly what she did as she fantasized being able to grasp at real material comfort.
She reached out with her empty hand into the still, deteriorating air of a shelter with far too many people and far too few showers to go around. That hand couldn't reach out and touch much of anything. There was nothing left for her to do, but to wait.
Against everything she had ever tried to define herself for, to make a living by the power of her own two hands... she was stuck in bed of a charity that was ready to collapse entirely. For the forseeable future, for what future was left for the world... she'd be stuck here, injured, incapable of fighting.
All she could do, in her own little self-centered way of thinking, was wait for Tabitha and that other young man to return with good news... and lots of food.
She would have to learn to trust in someone else to be able to help take care of her in a time of need where everyone else around her has all but given up hope of such.
In this respect, she at least still had a little strength over the other fellow refugees, but would that be enough as the walls of collapsing space and time came crashing down?
This being beyond her comprehension, she simply lay in wait for the next great meal for someone else to bring her.
There was at least one heartfelt wish for those who might yet come back for her, muttered in a weak, barely-audible voice.
"Erroso."
Log created on 15:03:53 10/18/2014 by GLaDOS, and last modified on 15:03:53 10/18/2014.