Anna

...Of all the nights...WHY TONIGHT?

Anna makes it home from Paris to find a forest in her house.
After two weeks of art galleries and amazing food, she does not need weird in her life so soon.

"DAMMIT JANIE. WHAT DID YOU DO?" she yells once she's set her bags down.

Hey guys. I just want to say I am SO SORRY for not tagging people as much. Work has started to get busy again and it's been keeping me on my phone/away from the computer so I haven't been poking characters and players as often as I should.
Things are actually going to get worse before they get better so I am so sorry. If you do need me, please poke my character and point me where you need her. I'm decent at replying to things via phone but I don't get the chance to search out new threads a lot b/c of data usage concerns.

Janie has gone to Hawaii and with that, Lynn is staying with her Fathers. Anna is alone in the house with her cats and her Darkness. She's gotten as used to the eerie reflection that watches her as is possible, and does her best to ignore the sensation that something lurks in the darkest shadows. She can't stop it, so she has stopped fighting it to a certain extent, letting it pool around her feet and cling to her hair as she passes between rooms in the house.

Milk the stray she rescued from a box by a river is, of her three cats, spooked the most. His ridge raises and he hisses and growls and spits at whatever is there watching, until she picks up the cat and settles it in her lap with soothing words she doesn't quite believe herself. Sometimes the cat calms down, sometimes it slinks away to hide somewhere in the house.

At night when she paints and loses herself in what she's working on, the Dark settles around her like a heavy blanket. When she curls up in her bed, or on the sofa to read, it wraps around her, pressing up close like one of her cats. Possessive and bold.

She's stopped turning on the lights except sometimes out of habit. She doesn't notice the evening's gradual darkening anymore and it takes her by surprise when she finally does notice it's late and almost as dark outside as it is in the house. Her eyes have adjusted. She's gotten used to existing in the dark, moving through it now with a measure of familiarity and comfort and second nature. She doesn't know if she should be concerned by this or not.

She debates going out some evenings. With a house to herself, meeting someone attractive and inviting them back doesn't seem like an inconsiderate thing. Ultimately she doesn't. She doesn't want to try to explain the sense of lurking shadows. What sort of pretty girl will put up with a lurking presence or the feeling that something is watching when they've come over for a one-night stand? A depressed part of her in the back of her mind resigns herself to the crushing fact that she may never have sex again.

“A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.”
― Jean Genet

“Night was a very different matter. It was dense, thicker than the very walls, and it was empty, so black, so immense that within it you could brush against appalling things and feel roaming and prowling around a strange, mysterious horror.”
― Guy de Maupassant

“Richard began to understand darkness: darkness as something solid and real, so much more than a simple absence of light. He felt it touch his skin, questing, moving, exploring: gliding through his mind. It slipped into his lungs, behind his eyes, into his mouth...”
― Neil Gaiman,

“Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.”
― Mark Twain

"Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”
― Mary Oliver

“Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.”
― Terry Pratchett

“It cannot be seen, cannot be felt,
Cannot be heard, cannot be smelt,
It lies behind stars and under hills,
And empty holes it fills,
It comes first and follows after,
Ends life, kills laughter.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien,

I had learned early to assume something dark and lethal hidden at the heart of anything I loved. When I couldn't find it, I responded, bewildered and wary, in the only way I knew how: by planting it there myself.”
― Tana French

“Even as a child, she had preferred night to day, had enjoyed sitting out in the yard after sunset, under the star-speckled sky listening to frogs and crickets. Darkness soothed. It softened the sharp edges of the world, toned down the too-harsh colors. With the coming of twilight, the sky seemed to recede; the universe expanded. The night was bigger than the day, and in its realm, life seemed to have more possibilities.”
― Dean Koontz

When walking alone in a jungle of true darkness,
there are three things that can show you the way:
instinct to survive, the knowledge of navigation,
creative imagination. Without them, you are lost.”
― Toba Beta

“Into your darkest corner, you are safe in my love, you are protected.”
― Agapi Stassinopoulos

“You can't study the darkness by flooding it with light.”
― Edward Abbey,

“Real things in the darkness seem no realer than dreams.”
― Murasaki Shikibu

“Darkness shields as much as it threatens.”
― R. Scott Bakker

“The night belongs to beasts of prey, and always has. It's easy to forget that when you're indoors, protected by light and solid walls.”
― Cornelia Funke

“What hath night to do with sleep?”
― John Milton

“Night is a time of rigor, but also of mercy. There are truths which one can see only when it’s dark”
― Isaac Bashevis Singer

“On nights like this when the air is so clear, you end up saying things you ordinarily wouldn’t. Without even noticing what you’re doing, you open up your heart and just start talking to the person next to you—you talk as if you have no audience but the glittering stars, far overhead.”
― Banana Yoshimoto

“Oh God, midnight’s not bad, you wake and go back to sleep, one or two’s not bad, you toss but sleep again. Five or six in the morning, there’s hope, for dawn’s just under the horizon. But three, now, Christ, three A.M.! Doctors say the body’s at low tide then. The soul is out. The blood moves slow. You’re the nearest to dead you’ll ever be save dying. Sleep is a patch of death, but three in the morn, full wide-eyed staring, is living death! You dream with your eyes open. God, if you had strength to rouse up, you’d slaughter your half-dreams with buckshot! But no, you lie pinned to a deep well-bottom that’s burned dry. The moon rolls by to look at you down there, with its idiot face. It’s a long way back to sunset, a far way on to dawn, so you summon all the fool things of your life, the stupid lovely things done with people known so very well who are now so very dead – And wasn’t it true, had he read somewhere, more people in hospitals die at 3 A.M. than at any other time...”
― Ray Bradbury,

I've been looking for it night after night, waiting patiently for it to show up, maybe somewhere in between the state of awake and asleep, alive and not so alive, sober and not so sober.
(I lost track of the difference somewhere in between.)”
-Charlotte Eriksson

“The world rests in the night. Trees, mountains, fields, and faces are released from the prison of shape and the burden of exposure. Each thing creeps back into its own nature within the shelter of the dark. Darkness is the ancient womb. Nighttime is womb- time. Our souls come out to play. The darkness absolves everything; the struggle for identity and impression falls away. We rest in the night.”
― John O'Donohue,

“When darkness falls and eyes stay shut
A chain of voices opens up.
Let wax not wane give breath to death.

p.s. Shhh"
-Yvonne Woon

“Anything seems possible at night when the rest of the world has gone to sleep.”
― David Almond,