User: Edith Matria

Civ: Resident Edith

The user is able to summon a building that reflects their own soul. Whenever somebody steps inside this building, they lose the ability to maintain survival necessities while outside of the building’s influence. First the ability to sleep, then to ingest anything, then to gain heat, and finally to breathe. Time also begins to seem as though it’s lengthening while inside of Resident Edith. The user can cancel these effects at will.

Thomas Finn had reached the top of the stairs, smearing blood on the wooden railing as he climbed his way up to the second floor. The second floor was a long hallway with about five bedrooms total, four on each side and one at the end of the corridor. The passage was dimly lit compared to the rest of the cosy cabin aesthetic and looked to Thomas like a scene in a horror movie where the monster jumps out of one of the doors. He knew that Edith was inside one of them, hiding. “Thinks she can hide from me, huh? How cute. PHANTRANA!” he shouted, summoning an extra four pairs of hands and eyes, one set to investigate each room while Thomas waited at the stairs.

The bedrooms were all identical, with raised beds that made great hiding places for a small elderly woman. Was she in one of the closets? Thomas rifled through the various outfits that lined the closets. Did one of them have feet attached to them? No. Then, where was she hiding?

Thomas thought about the nature of Edith’s Civ. He wasn’t even a hundred per cent sure that she even had one—and that terrified him. Was Thomas also affected by its power? Would he need to bargain for his own release? Suddenly Thomas saw a hole appear in the ceiling in the hallway in front of him—a hole created by a heat bullet that had been fired from somewhere above the second floor down into the hallway. There’s an attic?! And Grandma has a GUN?! Thomas thought. Suddenly, more shots rang out, travelling from the ceiling of the hallway down into the floor—and they were getting closer to Thomas. He needed to find the way into that attic quickly, for both his and Piotr’s sake.

He eventually found a trap door in the closet of one of the rooms: the one at the end of the hallway. Yet, for some reason, Thomas couldn’t manage to open it with just one phantom hand, and he’d need to get up there anyways if he wanted to give Edith his demands in such a way to make her actually listen. Thomas didn’t want to risk her just shooting a phantom mouth, which meant he’d have to run through the rain of bullets.

Thomas made a phantom foot and sent it into the closest of the room to his left and began stomping around, hoping to draw her fire. When he heard a shot ring out in the other room, he drew back the foot and used it to jump the remainder of the hallway . . . before being shot in the shoulder. Thomas instantly created a set of phantom vocal cords, then covered his mouth with his phantom hands to avoid screaming as he writhed in pain. He had to keep going, and that meant not getting shot again.

* * *

Edith Matria didn’t know who this asshole was, but there was no way she was going to let him stop her. She had been running this operation for years, providing good homes to people in need at no cost to them. All she asked for was a little company, a bit of time spent with a lonely old grandmother. She was a good person, and by God, she wasn’t going to die by getting punched by an evil twink. Edith fired shots at random through the various rooms, focusing on the hallway where she knew Thomas would have to move through. Suddenly, as she prepared to fire a shot through the hallway, a strange violet rope grabbed her hand through one of the tiny holes in the floor, wrapping around her wrist and pulling her down into the floor, knocking the gun out of her hand in the process. Then, another wrapped around her wrists, waist, neck, and forehead, stretching her and pulling her to the ground, rendering her completely immobile. How did he know where I was?

Edith Matria turned her head as much as she could to see the limping and partially hunched-over figure of Thomas Finn standing above the attic trapdoor. “Edith Matria, release Piotr and me from your Civ or I’ll be forced to do it myself,” Thomas shouted, pointing a bloody finger at Edith.

“But . . .” Edith started crying. “Okay. I don’t want to hurt anybody anyways. I just got scared when you attacked me. That’s all. I never wanted to kill Piotr.” Edith looked up at him, tears streaming down her wrinkly face.

Thomas eventually relented. “Ugh, fine. I’m sure Piotr will visit if you don’t pull this shit ever again.”

Hearing this, Edith’s expression lit up with a cheerful smile.

* * *

Piotr Ivanov could move again. After being nearly frozen into a block of ice, he felt the warmth of the air return to his body, and he stood up. Suddenly, a bullet flew toward him, though. 7 o’clock. The ice in his ears had melted away, and he heard exactly when the shot was fired. And he knew exactly when it would hit him, too. “MOVE THE HEADSTONES!” he shouted, spinning around and backhanding the bullet in midair, filling it with energy and sending it back—but not at Sauro. Suddenly, he watched a man fall from twenty feet in the air and land on the concrete, his stomach smacking into the ground as he lay sprawled out. He had destroyed the platform he stood on, and he was gearing up for another attack, grabbing the debris in his hand and preparing to throw it like a shotgun blast. Sauro was lying down, sprawled out in front of Edith Matria’s Home for the Wayward. He had managed to stand up, his bones sticking out from his legs as his knees buckled together. He was laughing. “MOVE THE HEADSTONES!” Piotr shouted, throwing a fistful of concrete at Sauro, sending out a dozen rock-hard bullets with electrical sparks trailing them.

“Umbrella,” Sauro responded through depraved laughs, and a wall of stopped water formed in front of him, a liquid shield that blocked the gravel spread. “Don’t you see, Piotr? There isn’t a single person who can beat my UMBRELLA!”

“You do realize that everybody who says that gets their Civ beaten, right?” Thomas said, standing behind Sauro in the house’s doorway with his arms folded, an army of phantom hands prepared to beat him into the ground. “My friend said that, and I thought it was pretty cool.” Thomas looked at Piotr. “And I have a very high opinion of my friends.” Suddenly, the phantom hands began pummeling Sauro, whose body shook, rattling through the air as he was turned into a human punching bag.

Thomas walked over to Piotr’s side, and the two stared down at Sauro as he lifted his squished-in bloody mess of a face off of the concrete. “I was really hoping you were evil so I’d get to beat you down, you nasty fuck,” Thomas said before turning to Piotr. “But I think you should get to do the honours, Piotr. And don’t worry about inconveniencing me or Blair. I had to learn how to ask for things from people by having a scary squid thing tell me, and I don’t want anybody else to go through that ever again.”

“It’s hard to believe that you, Thomas, could have insecurities,” Piotr said in his thick Russian accent, rubbing his neck in embarrassment. “This guy though,” Piotr said, right before stomping Sauro’s face back into the ground.

“W-where am I? What’s going on?” Sauro asked, his head finally being released from its indent in the pavement.

“Oh, looks like his head’s a bit messed up! Then I know the perfect place to put him,” Piotr said, turning to Thomas. Thomas nodded, and Sauro was lifted from the ground by Thomas’s phantom hands and sent right into Edith Matria’s Home for the Wayward. “See you for quilting night!” shouted both Thomas and Piotr in unison, before turning to look at each other. “You like quilting?”

“Well I can do a lot of it at once, you know?”

* * *

Hudson Beaudoin sat in his weather control room. He had managed to procure this technology for his gang only recently, and it has become an incredible asset to their function. Especially when it came to his Civ. The city's weather was now in the control of the Rainmaker Gang, and it had a brand-new, special objective. One that Hudson had gained after his brother Sauro had never hung up the call on his Unit. “So, Thomas Finn is back to vigilante work, hmm?” Hudson mused in a deep and powerful baritone. Hudson had also received intel from his ex-wife that “someone” was coming after him. It wasn’t hard for Hudson to connect the dots as he leaned back in his chair, overlooking a series of panels and cameras that showed Neonight City. He saw that Edith had returned home with Sauro. “Heavy Rain, Water Jet Cutter.”