[Phagemaker] allocated to Madison Clements

She had never been with a boy. Like, in a general sense. Never had a boyfriend, really.

It was an unfortunate side effect of several disparate things coming together to preclude the possibility of such.

First, of her original posse, she was generally considered the 'cute' one. She wasn't particularly curvy, wasn't especially fit. Sophia and Emma had a certain extraordinariness to them. An aspect to their physical appearances that was subtly more 'special' than the average teen.

In Emma it was obvious. Her red hair wasn't common, but wasn't weird either. It made her exotic. Her figure was several stages more mature than most other girls her age, and her modelling career left her feeling like the lead on a television show more than a normal highschool girl.

For Sophia it was different. Less obvious under casual observation. She was mean, and overly physical compared to her peers - but she also had a dangerous air to her that left her feeling more like a femme fatale then just a grouchy highschooler.

Madison didn't have any of that. She was pretty but only in a normal way. There wasn't any stand out feature that she could capitalize on to improve her looks.

She was just a slightly shorter than normal girl. That was it.

She made up for that by being more forward than the other two. More flirty. More willing to engage. Her proximity to her two more attractive, more unapproachable friends made her more attractive and popular by proxy, and she milked that fact for all it was worth.

Therein lay the problem however. In order to convince boys to do things she had to hint to them, tease them, with the possibility of her attention.

But she could never actually give it to any of them. She worked very hard not to be categorized as a slut or a whore.

It honestly made it a lot easier to project those things onto Taylor.

Which hadn't worked out well for her in the long run.

But that was a different point entirely.

Basically, she just wasn't accustomed to the idea of having a boyfriend. She actually still wasn't sure if she had a boyfriend. She and Oliver had never actually said they were dating, but given that she spent more time texting or talking to him than she did anything else, she was pretty sure he was interested. Probably. Her memories of how she got to where she was now were foggy, but she was reasonably certain that she had kissed him recently, and he had wrapped his arms around her and it had been just perfect so-

People didn't do that kind if thing if they weren't dating right?

This brought her to where she was currently. She should really wake up.

She should… really wake up. But… she couldn't. Which was strange because she wasn't even really sure she was actually asleep. She existed in a strange state of being where she was passively aware that she was conscious - but that was about it.

There was no vast empty space. There was no mental representation of where she was, or the state of her own mind. She couldn't feel her body, couldn't sense anything really. She was just a mind tethered to nothingness.

Absolutely no stimuli.

Well, there was… some stimuli. But it came from within. She could vaguely sense it in the background if her thoughts, a command to apologize, a command to hurt herself.

A command to die.

She couldn't quite remember where exactly the command had come from. She had a murky memory of approaching a girl who was being harassed by someone at a bus stop - she was trying to do what Olly would do, if less violently - and then… nothing.

If there was one thing she was thankful for, it was the fact that her present lack or any ability to follow through with those commands had largely shorted them out. The compulsion was still there, but as she couldn't do anything to satisfy it, it mostly faded into the background - allowing her to think properly.

She wondered if she was in a coma. There was a certain quality of delirium to her current state of being. A mania, that was simultaneously stopping her from blind panic, and pushing her further and further up the wall. Normally, a person in her situation would have something to strain against.

If she had fingers, she long since would have used then to claw at whatever was restraining her.

If she couldn't find a restraint, she might have simply clawed at herself - a reminder that she was alive, and real.

But she didn't have either of those things.

She only had the staggering nothingness to contemplate. The nothingness, and her own thoughts.

It was unfair. It was wrong. She was an unperson, trapped in the slight space between whatever robbed her of her body, and whatever was even now demanding control of her mind. She never asked for this. Sure, she had done some shitty things, but never anything she would consider truly heinous - nothing that might liken her to the monster her classmates treated her as. She hadn't even been informed of the locker thing until after it had happened. Sure, she stuck with her friends on that front - to start - but why was she the one being ostracized?

It had taken at most a day after the news broadcast that outed her involvement in Taylor's school life for her newly built social life to fall apart. She didn't tell Olly, because she was afraid he would view it as pathetic, or desperate, but she didn't really have friends anymore. She liked to think Emma and Sophia would have stuck by her, but both if them had mysteriously vanished from her life at almost the exact same time.

In a way, maybe it was ironic that her eventual apology to the girl who had technically ruined her life had come as an incidental side effect of a spat between her and someone else. Her apology, for all she had been ordered to give it, had felt superfluous next to the detailed instructions for how to end herself that accompanied it.

It was particularly ironic because she had decided she needed to apologize anyway. She certainly couldn't imagine dating the big blond doof while his boss actively hated her.

Well. She supposed that now couldn't imagine her dating Olly at all. Not like this, likely a vegetable in a hospital somewhere, if not outright a ghost if some kind.

She vastly preferred the former to the latter. At least if she was a vegetable, then eventually this abominable state of consciousness would end - when she died.

If she was a ghost… if she was a ghost, then this was pretty much it. It was just going to be this.

Forever.

She wanted to cry just thinking about it.

But she couldn't even do that. Couldn't feel the build up of pain in her throat as the tears came on. Couldn't feel the tension in her temples as sorrow took over.

She couldn't feel anything at all.

And it was this - the denial of even the simple emotional release of just crying - that proved her ultimate breaking point.

Suddenly, her perception of her surroundings twisted, and she found her perspective had suddenly shifted.

Above her two beings of fantastic size twined together in eternal union, spiralling towards a point that was always just slightly too far away for them to reach. There was something sad about. Pathetic even.

With a jolt, she realized that the feelings weren't coming from her, but from something else. A tiny fragment of one of the beings overhead, regarding its progenitors with equal parts dismay and pity.

In the refractory light of that errant fragment, she could see entire worlds where things were different. Where the fantastical was mundane. Where the insane was the norm.

Where fear was fuel.

But also love, and courage, and about a million other feelings humans didn't properly have words for. Each sensation, each emotion, each feeling had an uncanny flavour to it.

And the only one she found she truly couldn't stomach, was despair.

All of which, was coming from her.

Madison blinked awake at an extremely inopportune moment.

For one thing, it took her several seconds to realize that she had, in fact, blinked. It took her several more to grasp that she was starving. Not just physically but… mentally.

She wasn't sure if there was really a better way to describe it than that. She had a sort of… mental stomach now. Along with her returned senses, she had seemingly acquired a new one. She mentally visualized it like a snakes tongue, darting out to taste the air around her. Less a constant sense, and more a radar ping.

A ping that returned to her a few moments later telling her that in the air around her was a goodly amount of sickly bitter tasting despair - her own mostly - a great deal of anger, and an absolutely staggering sensation of greed.

She quickly and almost thoughtlessly tuned herself to that one, as it was the mostly likely to fill her second stomach. As she did so, she got her first solid look at her surroundings.

She couldn't tell if she was in a prison cell or a hospital room. There was a hospital bed, as well as an IV drip and a host of other machines hooked up to her that she preferred not to think about. But the room itself was made of bleak grey concrete, and had a heavy steal door as its only exit.

"H-hello?" She croaked quietly, her throat dry and scratchy from going who knows how long without water. She didn't care. She could feel her second stomach filling appreciably with the unrelenting greed in the air around her. She wouldn't say that she was actually removing or burning up the emotional energy in order to fuel herself. It felt more like… skimming? A chemical reaction? Something she was doing was reacting with the greed. And the result was greed energy.

She… thought.

It was a lot of sensory information to parse at once, not helped by the taste of the energy turning her thoughts immediately to the things she wanted.

Which was mostly to have all these tubes and needles out if her, to have some food and water, and to see Olly.

She was surprised to find that as she finished that thought, her stomach finally filled - and there was a sharp popping sensation as she felt her 'stomach' drain.

Instantly, she felt a boiling sense of need - as well as the jarring sensation of her body suddenly being five feet to the left of where she had originally been laying. All the needles and things that had once been inside her thudded to the ground as she pressed her body up against the door in order to out herself closer to what she wanted.

No, what she needed.

And really, she was realizing she needed a lot more things now than she had originally realized. She needed to be out of this room. She needed her Olly, and she needed a change of clothes - mostly because for all she was glowing fluorescent orange, she was also naked.

She felt pretty good, all things considered. A little floaty, maybe? She imagined this was what being high felt like. Only, she hadn't used a drug to get this way.

"I don't need to worry about it though." She consoled herself absently, preparing to do… something… to the door that was between her and the glowing emanation of pure greed she could feel beyond it.

Then she heard the thing speak.

"You, kill him, then yourself." An oddly lilting voice called gleefully, androgynous in that she honestly couldn't tell the gender of the speaker.

Or she wouldn't, if she didn't have the mental image of a woman at a bus stop to associate with the voice. A voice that mirrored the one she had spent long hours ignoring as it ordered her to kill herself in as gruesome a way as possible.

Madison - even through the haze of greed and want filling her head - recognized that voice, and was terrified of it. So terrified that she found herself suddenly pressed as far away from the door as was physically possible for her, once more with no intervening movement to the action.

She instinctively felt that she could teleport at will across her rather small area of influence, at least, so long as she felt she needed to - which wasn't hard since she was basically nothing but needs and wants right now.

Even her fear expressed itself as a need to be away from that voice.

There were two quick pops, as gunfire rang out in the hallway beyond her door, then silence for a bit, and then the voice spoke again.

"Get her eyes open." It said impatiently.

"She's in a medical coma - I don't think-" a new voice responded hesitantly.

"Get her eyes open." The voice repeated. There was a shuffling sound as whoever was being spoken to complied.

"You will not attack me or anyone else unless ordered to do so. You will follow my orders. You will not leave my side under any circumstances." It stated.

There was a soft chuckle. Almost girlish and feminine, but subtly wrong somehow. Twisted. Madison wondered how she could hear any of this through what must be several feet of concrete, but then reasoned that she could hear it because she needed to.

It seemed as good an explanation as anything else.

"Now let's see… get those two doors open. Make it quick - I'm sure the lovely people upstairs will have noticed something wrong by now."

There was a brutal wrenching sound, the scream of tortured metal being flung away from something, and then a soft clapping.

"Yup. I like you. You're perfect. Repeat after me, until you believe it - which I order you to do. 'I am Terminus, and I will do as I am told'." The voice said pleasantly.

"I am Terminus and I will do as I am told." A somewhat frustrated and angry sounding womans voice stated.

Then she said it again. And again.

She didn't stop saying it, actually. She only really paused to breath. She supposed the caveat that she had to keep saying it until she believed it was why.

"Hm. Bit longer than I'd like. Guess I'll have to take these two after all - I suppose I can multitask. You and you, come here and hold still while I free you. Then repeat after me." The voice crooned, and then suddenly three female voices were repeating the same phrase out in the hallway.

"I am Terminus, and I will do as I am told."

After a very short period of time, the voices synched up, until they were speaking in one eerie chorus.

Madison felt a shudder of revulsion run through her, even though she couldn't honestly understand the purpose of the chant, beyond being dehumanizing in the extreme.

She also noticed that she could feel her empty 'stomach' again, and glanced down to realize that she had subconsciously turned her newly acquired power off in an attempt to dim the glow of her body, and prevent attention from being drawn to her.

"I suppose this would be where they're keeping my love letter?" The voice outside mused, sending a thrill of fear through her.

Fear that had risen across the area, mixing with the still predominant flavor of greed in the air.

Fear that she would be forced to go back to the dark place, where there was nothing and no one to preoccupy her.

Fear that the voice would speak and she would listen.

Fear that just as she finally escaped one situation, she would immediately find herself in another, more dangerous one.

It was a feeling she was unfortunately used to at this point. The sensation of a precipice from which there was no return. Madison was sure that if she could look back at her life, there would be many such cliffs behind her.

So she did the only thing she could do. She listened to the part if her that urged her to use her powers, and catalyzed the ambient fear. A soft yellow glow emanates from her, and she instinctively wrapped the power she was using around the room she was in.

She knew that she would only be able to keep the power active so long as there was fear to fuel it, but she found herself more and more terrified of doing anything else the longer she maintained it. It was like a self reinforcing loop. She was afraid, so her power worked. She was afraid her power work - so it worked.

Outside the door, she could hear the voice make a confused sound, then grunt in annoyance - the most masculine sound she had ever heard it make.

"What was I..? Hm. Come on, let's go my pretties." The voice said.

It didn't get a verbal response, at least, not unless one counted the continued chanting from the women outside.

The chanting receded into the distance as she waited, huddled in the corner of the room - but try as she might she couldn't bring herself to lower the effect that had protected her from the voice. Somehow, she felt certain that if she did so, she would be out in that hallway in short order, chanting along with all the rest.

'I am Terminus, and I will do as I am told.' She thought to herself, the words already burned into her mind by the trauma of her situation.

So she sat, and she waited.

And she feared for her future.

A/N: I mentioned checking all the omake before posting this but as it turns out I have to be awake in… two hours for an appointment so I'm going to defer that to tomorrow where possible. Here's he interlude. It's not perfect - I wish I could have spent longer on it - but I think it gets the job done in a rambling sort of way.

Forgive any spelling mistakes or grammatical errors - writing on my phone is a pain. Enjoy.