A/N: Hi, inFAMOUS lovers. I figured I'd make my mark in this fandom. So. This is kinda like a OC/Cole friendship thing. I want to try for... maybe some Zeke/Moya or something. Or Moya/Cole. XD Parings are good! This fandom doesn't have many! This is in first person PoV from my OC. So. Read on, people. I need your good R&R.


-: Chapter One: I Am The Messenjah :-

I message, written in rhyme, prophetic
Teachers amongst the skeptics and guiding the misdirected
Infected with their lies and their alibis
With their third eye blind, out of line, they try to prophesy
I and I unfold the mysteries told
From the futuristic realms to the days of old.

Make straight through the path of the one voice calling
Truth shines, back again two times in the Second Coming.

-- POD -- "I Am The Messenjah"

Well, art is art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.

I'm getting less good at faking it. People in my family are noticing and asking what's wrong. My friends give me invitations to talk, to cry. I love them for their caring, but I want to run from it. I have lost their language, their facility with words that convey feelings. I am in new territory and feel like a foreigner in theirs.

But I kept telling myself one thing. I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

Fear of self is the greatest of all terrors, the deepest of all dread, the commonest of all mistakes. From it grows failure. Because of it, life is a mockery. Out of it comes despair. And boy, I was afraid of myself. I had a great family. But even more so, I had a great kid. I had adopted her just before the blast. Just before the same blast that had fucked up my way of life up forever.

In truth, a family is what you make it. It is made strong, not by number of heads counted at the dinner table, but by the rituals you help family members create, by the memories you share, by the commitment of time, caring, and love you show to one another, and by the hopes for the future you have as individuals and as a unit. That blast took it all away from me. The real question isn't whether or not you love your kids, but how well you are able to demonstrate your love and caring so that your children really feel loved.

I started changing during the second week of quarantine. I dunno if it was exactly at the time, but that's how I remember it. People started dying around me. Almost as if I was draining the life right out of them. I began to act weird—needing a drink of water every fifteen minutes. Sometimes I wouldn't even be hungry. Sometimes—all I needed was a quick fix of beer or something. To lemonade—to fine wine—as long as it was some type of liquid, I would drink it.

And yes, I know what you're thinking. If I was truly parched, I wouldn't hesitate to drink my own piss. There was no way in hell I wanted to… but I couldn't stop myself. I was becoming something else. Something inhumane. Something terrifying.

The anxiety of being able to control my urges was like poison ivy. It took nothing to set off that mental itch—a chance remark, remembering an event from the day before—but once it started, I found it impossible to stop the cycle. My thoughts twisted in a circle, my pulse hammered, I couldn't concentrate.

The anxiety, I told myself, was a sign of improvement; at least it wasn't despair. But in some ways it was worse. It was like being locked in an airtight box, about to run out of oxygen. Impossible at those moments to sit still, impossible to complete a task, impossible to do anything but get outside and walk, for miles, trying to outrace it. It was like a crazy itch, way down under my skin, and I never knew when it would attack.

I sat for days saying, "This is a strange business. You're the strange business. You have the energy of the sun in you, but you keep knotting it up at the base of your spine."

I never liked water. I never could swim. As a matter of fact, drowning was one of my fears. But as I kept living, more people around me kept dying. First, my mother Jeanne. Next, my father. I had lost them. You want to know what was going through my mind? They didn't die from natural disease. They didn't die from old age. They didn't die from Reaper attacks. The doctors at the hospitals told me they died from dehydration. And I was the one being a total water-freak. Sure, I was probably overreacting. But here's the thing. My wonderful daughter, Yvonne started showing signs of dehydration.

Dehydration occurs when the amount of water leaving the body is greater than the amount being taken in. The body is very dynamic and always changing. This is especially true with water in the body. We lose water routinely when we: breath, as humidified air leaves the body, when we sweat to cool the body, and when we urinate or have a bowel movement to rid the body of waste products.

In a normal day, a person has to drink a significant amount of water to replace this routine loss. My folks were very healthy people, and they hardly did anything around the house.

Basically, I was losing it. And that's an understatement. When the city went under quarantine, we weren't the richest people on the planet. Yvonne and I had to sleep in the same room together. And by the time I had started to notice Yvonne getting sicker, I wanted to stay as far as I could away from her. Y'know, it hurt. Being a parent, all I wanted was to be near her.

And that's when despair started to kick in. I thought that the despair would stop me cold, but it didn't: it wrapped itself up in a dark corner somewhere inside me and forced the rest of my system to function, to take care of practical matters, which may not have been important—but which keep kept me going, which guaranteed that I was still, somehow, alive.

But if I had let go of the feelings which caused me pain, I would have no feelings at all. It wasn't apathy. It wasn't even angst (though it was something close to it). I didn't know what the hell this feeling was, truthfully.

Who ever said that misery loved company? My misery did not love company. My misery loved to be alone. My misery threatened to bludgeon company. So, not standing the fact that I couldn't even be by my own daughter, I began to walk the streets, often leaving her in the company of one of my friends. Y'know, when a bomb blows half a city sky high, people have no choice but to walk the streets. Walking around, I didn't know the city was this bad. There were Reapers everywhere. People being terrorized. Policemen dying. Hell, there were even people trying to eat people. This was no place to live. It had certainly turned into a dog-eat-dog world.

People were like lice—they got under your skin and buried themselves there. You scratch and scratch until the blood comes, but you can't get permanently deloused. Everywhere I went, people were making a mess of their lives. Everyone had had his private tragedy. It was in the blood now—misfortune, ennui, grief, suicide. The atmosphere was saturated with disaster, frustration, futility. Scratch and scratch—until there's no skin left.

I looked around me and all I saw were miserable people. Everyone was in the rat race to try and outdo everyone else. Money, power, greed, corruption, sex. Life just seemed to be a mixture of eating, sleeping, fornicating and excreting waste. I don't mean to sound like some kind of depressed nihilist but it's true—our lives were meaningless.

We procreate and have miserable children who go about doing the same stupid things that have been done since the beginning of time.

Hate, racism, fascism, murder, rape ... Over and over forever.

I consider myself to be a fairly open minded person, and I just find it hard to understand why our world is so fucked up. We have the technology and infrastructure to set up a system where everyone could be fed and clothed and supplied with the basic necessities for living a decent life, yet most of the world lives in extreme poverty. Even now, with this quarantine.

I was beginning to think, "Our whole world is nothing but a world of grief and misery, and its inhabitants are nothing but grieving and miserable people. The living beings on this earth are all destined for slaughter. The azure heaven and the round earth are no more than a great slaughter-yard, a great prison."

Okay, I thought. Here you are. You are here. And you move forward because that's the way it works; that's the only place you can go. You keep going until it stops hurting, or until you find new things to hurt you worse, I guess. And that is the human condition, all of us lurching along in our own private miseries, because that's the way it is.

I was thinking how amazing it was that the world contained so many lives. Out in these streets people were embroiled in a thousand matters, money problems, love problems, school problems. People were falling in love, getting married, going to drug rehab, learning how to ice-skate, getting bifocals, studying for exams, trying on clothes, getting their hair cut, and getting born. And in some houses people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and that was the thing that really mattered.

Before I found out for myself, I might have imagined that in the aftermath of personal apocalypse, the little bothers of life would effectively vanish. But it's not true. You still feel chills, you still despair when a package is lost in the mail, and you still feel irked to discover you were shortchanged at Starbucks. My thoughts were interrupted. Here I was, standing with… God knows how many people… and I heard this bloodcurdling screaming. It was something that I thought I would have never heard in my life. It was a sound I'd expect to come from dogs. And there was a man. Skinny, afraid. This man stood right in front of me. Perplexed. Afraid. Trying to figure out what sort of monster was running towards us. With a bomb in its hand.

I could have told him that nothing was safe, and that no matter how careful you were and how hard you tried, there were still accidents, hidden traps, and snares. You could get killed on an airplane or crossing the street. Your marriage could fall apart when you weren't looking; your husband could lose his job; your baby could get sick or die. I could have said that nothing is safe, that the surface of the world is pretty and sane, but underneath it's all fault lines and earthquakes waiting to happen.

But I didn't open my mouth. My lungs felt like bursting with water. It was humid that day.

Bottom line is, even if you see them coming, you're not ready for the big moments. No one asks for their life to change, not really. But it does. So, what are we, helpless? Puppets? Nah. The big moments are gonna come, you can't help that. It's what you do afterwards that counts. That's when you find out who you are.

"Get out of the way," I commanded, pushing the man on the concrete. "Never stand in the way of a running man. An armed dangerous man, no less."

In violence, it is the getting away that you concentrate on. When you begin to go over the edge, life receding from you as a boat recedes inevitably from shore, you hold on to death tightly, like a rope that will transport you, and you swing out on it, hoping only to land away from where you are. My black hair managed to float as my hood came down. And the ends of my hair floated even higher into the air. And then my hands... The people standing around me started to … feel weak… for lack of a better word. And then I felt the power surging through my veins. My hands started to get wet. It was weird.

That day, I was wearing a voile skirt that offered a new take with ruffles on the top and three pleated layers with jagged hems. It was a mini-skirt. I also wore really baggy leg warmers. My hoodie was rather big, and when I stood up straight, I could hardly see my fingers. My hair is black, and I wear it down. And I'm about 5'7". But none of that was any of my concern right now.

I found out who I was.

Humidity is the amount of water vapor in the air. In daily language the term "humidity" is normally taken to mean relative humidity. Relative humidity is defined as the ratio of the partial pressure of water vapor in a parcel of air to the saturated vapor pressure of water vapor at a prescribed temperature. Humidity may also be expressed as absolute humidity and specific humidity. Relative humidity is an important metric used in forecasting weather. Humidity indicates the likelihood of precipitation, dew, or fog. High humidity makes people feel hotter outside in the summer because it reduces the effectiveness of sweating to cool the body by preventing the evaporation of perspiration from the skin. This effect is calculated in a heat index table.

The screaming guy stopped making any amount of noise. Water, from my hands, began to strangle the man. I felt no remorse. It was a quick death. The man that I just saved, not hurt, but drained, began to gasp at me.

"Who… who are you?"

"Nérine. The name's Nérine." And I walked away.

This was a period of hope, true, but we harbor the illusion that times of hope are devoid of tensions and conflicts when, in my experience, they are the most dangerous. Hope for some means its loss for others; when the hopeless regain some hope, those in power—the ones who had taken it away—become afraid, more protective of their endangered interests, more repressive. In many ways these times of hope, of greater leniency, were as disquieting as before.

Hope was like the sun, which, as I journey toward it, was bound to give me cancer. … We need hope as surely as we need food and water, love, and friendship. The trick, however, is to remember that hope is a perilous thing, that it's not a steel and concrete bridge across the void between this moment and a brighter future. Hope is no stronger than tremulous beads of dew strung on a filament of spider web, and it alone can't long support the terrible weight of an anguished mind and a tortured heart.