Camp Paradise - There's really no place like home

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AmethystWallflower

Everything about me is Purple
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Posting Speed
  1. 1-3 posts per day
  2. One post per day
  3. 1-3 posts per week
  4. One post per week
  5. Slow As Molasses
Online Availability
Evenings, Nights and Weekends
Writing Levels
  1. Intermediate
  2. Adept
  3. Advanced
  4. Prestige
  5. Adaptable
Preferred Character Gender
  1. Male
  2. Female
  3. Primarily Prefer Female
  4. No Preferences
Genres
Fantasy. Harry potter. Vampire. Apocalyptic. Magical. Super powers. Trouble teens w/ powers. Psych wards. Werewolf. Zombies. 4 Horseman.
Plot

Kids from the ages 8-10 began to act differently from their peers. Some showed signs of telepathy; tapping into someone’s head and influencing the host; Oranges. Some showed signs of being able to control objects with their minds, even being able to toss a person across the room with just a flick of the wrist; Blues. Some were incredibly in-tuned to technology, so much so that they could almost control the virus’ and malware they created by just thinking about them; Greens. The Reds were the fire-starters. Yellows had electricity running so freely through them that a single child that had control of their abilities could light up and entire city; more often than not the young yellow caused electrical devices to buzz with so much electricity the object simply exploded. Reds and Oranges were consistently labeled as violent; sparking fires with a snap of the fingers, causing complete chaos to erupt during meal-time by making the kids think all the food was poisonous, or a kid dropping to the ground in convulsions, the ones that were prone to use their abilities to either inflict harm on the other camp-goers, but mainly the Staff. Eventually, it was rare for an Orange or Red to exist in the camps. Their violent nature soon forced the government to eradicate the two colors as best they could. To identify a child’s color a series of tests are done at the time of registering. From there the child’s name is forgotten, replaced by a color and an identification number. If the child didn’t show signs of one of the five abilities, they simply got sick and died. So now, children are frequently tested from birth for any signs of ability. For the most part the ‘freaks’, as the scared public so fondly calls them, had stopped appearing after the first three years of the ‘epidemic’. However, there are still a few that are born with one of five abilities, and if the Saviors don’t step in at the right time of transfer, those children are carted off to camps.

The camps had been established in the year 2368, ten years prior to the current date of the setting. The camps were built across the United States. Most of the kids residing in said camps do not know of any camp but their own, and it is rare, if heard of at all, that a camp-goer has escaped; that being said, it has been heard of. The children are kept under extreme security measures and are separated by their color. In times of chaos or when the entire camp needs to be controlled at once a loud, painful white noise is blasted over intercoms and speakers that cause the camp-goers to drop to the ground and become completely immobile; this is a noise only they can hear. This White noise technique is not new to the Paradise Camp in Louisiana, the first and largest camp (totaling over 2,000 campers), but it has yet to be seen in the other camps where their methods of maintaining peace range from extreme violence to just simply killing the camper that is causing the situation. To the public these camps are for the good of the children and their families, a type of rehabilitation for their acquired abilities, in reality they are horrid places where campers are kept in fear by the government.

It’s not until a group of self-proclaimed saviors infiltrate Camp Paradise with an agent posted as a nurse and help free a camper (or two) with the promise of fairness and care. It has been known to the kids surviving outside the camps, the ones who managed to escape capture or even a camp, the ones lucky enough to not have their families so terrified of them to turn them to the camps themselves, that The Saviors have an agenda all their own; that they want to use some of the kids to build their own army to overthrow the President. The Saviors are no better than the Government at this point. Most of the members see the kids as freaks, as a waste of resources that are already running thin. Very few still hold on to the idea that they are to free the kids from camps, the Leader being one of them but slowly losing his following, while the rest of the rebel group has shifted to eradicating the children and restoring the ideals of government.
Are these Saviors really here to help the campers out of the goods of their hearts or do they want the campers to use them as weapons for their own plans of total government overthrow? Will the camper help the Saviors and burn the government to the ground (figuratively or literally) or chose to fend for themselves, free of Camp Paradise themselves, eventually moving to free the others? Or maybe, find a way to abolish or realign The Saviors line of focus from eradication and overthrow back to the safety of the children, bring down the poisoned Government, and free all the remaining children locked away on the camps at the same time?


Quick Color Explanation In order of potential threat
Red; Fire-starters. Capable of creating & manipulating fire.
Orange; Telepathic; psychic. They are capable of influencing people an controlling their minds, actions and even produce hallucinations.
Blue; Telekinesis
Yellow; Able to intensify and manipulate electricity. Sometimes t great risk to themselves.
Green; Technology. Considered smarter than any computer in existence. Are able to figure out any equation given to them. Nothing is out of their reach when it comes to Technology.


My Character
Name: Seanix Everstone
Age: 20
Gender: Female
Color: Thought to be Green - Red
Camp: Camp Paradise; The first camp built.
History: Up until the epidemic, Seanix had an average, happy childhood. She had been one of a small percentage of children between the ages 8 and10 that survived the sudden flu epidemic that ravaged the country, killing thousands of kids her age. Shortly after what seemed to be the end of an incurable plaque, the government sent out agents dressed in all black to collect the surviving children. Most parents fought to keep their children, fought to keep their families together while so many others mourned their broken ones. Some had already noticed their child’s new ability and were afraid, they willing gave the children up to the government to be rid of them. Seanix’s family were one of the ones that thought they had gotten lucky. She never openly showed any signs of any strange behavior other than the withdrawn nature she acquired after the death of so many of her classmates, but her parents had expected such changes. They tried to stress as much to the agents, but were ignored and shoved aside. Seanix knew she hadn’t gotten lucky, but she never told her parents. She had a few instances where she sparked a few tiny fires, but nothing a panicked 10 year-old couldn’t handle with basic knowledge of emergencies taught in an afternoon by a guest firefighter at her school. When the government came and the loud protesting reached her upstairs in her room, Seanix hid in her closet and pretended to be somewhere else. Of course, they found her, it was a feeble place to hide, but where else was she supposed to go? Everyone was surprisingly gentle with her, even letting her pack a bag and taking her favorite stuffed animal for ‘emotional support’ she overheard one of the agents say. She was allowed to say goodbye to her parents; her mother a ball of emotion, tears already coating her face, her hug too tight like she was trying to remember what Seanix would feel like, her father looked on the verge of the same reaction but he was holding it together fairly well. The second her house was out of sight, the demeanor of every single adult changed and became close to violent, and the stuffed animal she was allowed to take with her was ripped from her hands and tossed out the window of the moving vehicle and she never saw the belongings she packed again.
Appearance: By requirement, her hair is kept at shoulder length, it was a deep chocolate brown that fell mostly straight, only a slight wave when long. She stands at 5 foot 4 inches, weighing in at a light 105 pounds. If not for Camp Paradise, she would be more tan than the pale color she currently retains. Her eyes normally a vibrant green, but dulled due to the life at camp. Like all other kids in the camps, her only clothing are the 2-piece outfits made in the color that represented her ability, and a pair of plain, black shoes.


My intro :]
During the entire duration of her stay here at Camp Paradise, Seanix had the same scene play over in her head almost each night. It was a group of undistinguishable men and women, all in their fifties or so, all in suits that made them look like a single multi-headed beast. Each body blending and mixing with the ones on either side of it and it curled around an overly large table; a map of the United States printed neatly over its surface. The rest of the room was left in black, but faint beeps and whirs of machines could be heard from behind the beast. When her dream shifted to focus on the conversation rather than the beast's awful grey, hunched form, Seanix could hear cackling and laughter that dripped with so much fear and anxiety you could almost see it puddle on the dirt smeared floor beneath the feet she always imagined bare and gnarled. They were always discussing the name of her camp. Planning when it would birth and what it would grow into with enough money and fear to nurture it. Several names were always tossed around between the heads, spat out and swallowed between pointed, jagged, and yellowed teeth. Camp Wonderful, Camp Wonderland, Camp Blissful, but they always came back to Camp Paradise. It was like the name was a joke to them, laughing when all agreed upon the camp's title. It would be Paradise to them, the government, because all the freak children would be locked away, hidden from the rest of the country like the mistake would just be forgotten, grow old and die, while they did their best to bring the country out of the wreck they drove it into.

Seanix always woke when the beast had decided on the name of her home with a shrill laugh, always woke with her chocolate brown hair stuck to her face and neck with sweat. That dream, no - that nightmare, began her first night at Camp Paradise. After hours of sitting on a bus, hours of standing in a line waiting for whatever horrors or tests the people in black attire steering her and the group of kids she was herded with towards. Finally, after what felt like days trapped in the same night, Seanix had been granted the sweet gift of a small, warm, ash gray room with a one-way mirror. A single steel table with a matching pair of chairs on either side sat in the very center. Seanix had been guided to one of the chairs and instructed to plant her ass in the seat facing the fucking mirror and to not move, to not even breathe loud enough for them to hear. She remembered cementing herself in that chair and being alone for what had to of been at least three hours and sobbing as quietly as she could. Eventually a tall, thin woman with the face that Seanix remembered resembled a type of bird she saw once, came and sat in the opposing chair. It was several long minutes before the Crow Woman spoke, and when she did, it was the most seemingly generic questions that somehow determined what ability she had. Then, after a pause and Seanix's soft crying finally came to an end, she was asked to show them what it was she could do, exactly. Panic had welled up in her chest, gripping her heart with its invisible claws. She rattled off something she had accidentally heard her father say recently. She was only ten then, but with her father being an Accountant she had figured the string of numbers and how they had fit together seemed like something a ten-year old shouldn't know.

Whether it was due to Seanix being one of the last kids to be registered and sorted and the Crow Woman was exhausted and sloppy, or she really could pull off being something other than what she was, because she was escorted out of the room, into another where she was stripped of the pink and white polka-dot pajamas and dirty powder blue slippers she had been wearing, was roughly bathed and put into a green sweat shirt and sweat pants. Thick, blocky black letters had already been pressed to the back of the shirt near the hem at the bottom; like she had been assigned to the fitting, not the other way around. The rest of the night passed in a rush of blurs, eventually she had landed in the top bunk in the middle of a small building with a group of girls that wore matching green sweat suits.

Seanix knew what she was at the time, she hadn't realized there had already been a label created for it, though. She did know, however, that the kids that openly expressed their abilities on the black clad figures, influencing them into opening fire on their squad members then turning the gun on themselves or walking by an officer smoking a cigarette and a boy using the cherry of the cigarette to cause the man to actually burst into flames, those would be the kids that were treated the worst, the ones to be made an example of to get the rest of the kids to hunch their shoulders and whimper to themselves. Eventually, those kids, the Oranges and Reds, disappeared from the camp completely. The staff never spoke about what happened to them, but they never came back and the staff seemed that much happier about it, so most everyone accepted they were dead. She would never speak of what she could do. Not to anyone.

Now, ten years later, Seanix was still in the same camp, wearing the same green clothing, suffering the same tortures she had since the very beginning. The only difference - about five years back the staff had installed a sort of White Noise that blasted over the intercoms. It was a noise frequency that the scientists at Camp Paradise had somehow found that only the Psy children were able to hear. It was a crippling noise, causing pain to rip through the skull, tear at the back of the eyes, send anyone to their knees and bring them near to blacking out. The head would get fuzzy and a child was barely able to breathe, let alone use their ability. Among what seemed to be hundreds of rules and thousands of cameras, the use of an ability was strictly forbidden. This was a rehabilitation camp after all, and they were supposed to be suppressing them to the point that they shrank away to nothing and they were considered cured. Of course, that wasn't happening. There was no cure.

Tonight was no different. It was a few hours before the sun would rise, maybe just after one in the morning, cloudy grey eyes stared up at the ceiling, but not really looking at it. Seanix was awake, covered in sweat, hair sticking to every bare piece of skin and the thin sheet they were allowed this time of year had been thrown off and bunched at her feet, threatening to slip off the edge. It took her a moment to steady her heartbeat and catch her breath before she used the sleeve of her shirt to wipe the sweat from her forehead. She had always wondered why it was that particular dream that had infected her every night. So many other things could be in its place, yet they weren't. She was partially thankful for it, but it didn't lessen the hate and anxiety the grey beast caused in her chest and head.

With both hands, she cleared away each strand of hair from her face and did her best to dry the sweat from her cheeks. She ended up wiping her palms on the top of her mattress before turning over on top her stomach to strain her eyes to see out the tiny barred window two beds over from her. The girl beneath the window slept with her mouth wide open and the blanket hanging over the side, creating a curtain hiding the girl underneath. It remained this way until the sun fully rose into the sky and the staff dressed in black marched their way to every door to wake each cabin for breakfast. This routine had never changed, she was ready for them by the time they burst through the door, startling more than have the girls awake. She rolled herself over the side of her bunk and landed with a soft thud next to the girl emerging from her own bunk beneath her. They made eye contact for just a moment before both pairs of eyes were and the floor, searching for nothing. They made dual lines that marched out of the cabin towards the mess hall.

The group of girls made it just over halfway to the large building before they were forced to the ground by the White Noise. It took no time at all for each and every body in a colored outfit to hit the floor from either going weak in the knees at hearing the noise, or passing out from the pain of it. Seanix’s eyes were squeezed shut, her mind only focusing on making sure her lungs pumped air in and out. Pain gripped every nerve throughout her entire body, ceasing any and all potential attempts at using her ability. She barely felt the hands that ripped her up from the ground and away from the double line of green plastered to the concrete. Her hands remained tightly clamped over her ears as she was forced to move, her eyes stayed shut. If it weren’t for the force of the person moving her, Seanix would have collapsed. When the shoving finally stopped, the noise was muffled enough for her to stand on her own, but the pain in her head was bringing spots to her vision each time she attempted to open her eyes. It was several minutes before the White Noise was shut off and Seanix recovered enough to hold a semi-decent conversation. Although usually expected to immediately rise and move on from the noise like it had never happened, it was actually quite difficult and took several hours to recover from it. Her movements would be sluggish, and it would take longer for her to properly process things, but Seanix could open her eyes without feeling like she suddenly needed to vomit.

The face before her swam slightly before becoming steady, the face of a young man in all black, the storage closest he had pulled them into slowly coming into focus. Confusion and panic made its way to the surface as she stumbled, pressing her back against the wall. His hand flew to cover her mouth, seeing her want to scream. “I’m not with the camp.” His voiced was hushed but it was urgent. “I’m getting you out of here, but you need to stay calm.” He paused for a second to risk removing his hand. “And quiet.” Seanix bit her lip until she could taste blood, but stayed silent. “I’m going to tranq you.” He quickly reached in his pocket to retrieve a syringe that was filled with a small amount f dark blue liquid. “It’s going to bring you to a death-like state and I’m going to move you out of here like a goddamn corpse. Fool proof.” A cocky grin was plastered on his face like he had spent days practicing it in the mirror.

Several emotions consumed Seanix. Disbelief was definitely among the top three. Why would this man, who obviously worked for the government – why else would he be wearing the uniform of the keepers - be risking not only is job but his life to get her out of the camp? Pure fear wasn’t far behind. How was she to trust this man? She didn’t recognize him, and she had grown to know every face of every employee here during her 10-year stay.

Before Seanix had a chance to protest being put into such a state, he jammed the needle into her arm, through the fabric of her long sleeve, and injected her with the dark blue serum. Within thirty seconds the pain in her head fizzled away along with any feeling she had at all. She looked down at her hands, the action seemed to be in slow motion, then up to her captor. She opened her mouth to say something, she didn’t know what, but instead his face faded to black and she collapsed in his barely prepared arms. “Jesus, that worked faster than they said...” He grumbled under his breath as he lifted Seanix up and gentle laid her over his shoulder.

She was distantly aware of the fact she was laid flat yet moving. She couldn’t move her arms or legs even if she wanted to, and it was like her eyes were cemented shut. She imaged herself screaming for help, but she couldn’t find her voice, it was lost in the muffled noises of the world around her. This was nothing like what she expected death to be. This was not serene or peaceful, she never saw a white light, but there was no pain either, no movement, no breathing, nothing. Seanix drifted in this limbo for what felt like days rather than the hours it had been, and when feeling and movement began to slowly return, so did the panic. Shat wasn’t dead, but where was she? It took several minutes for her eyes to fully process the room she was in, and less time than that to take notice she was the only person in it. She had been a patient at the mediocre infirmary Camp Paradise had, and this was not it. Her brain struggled to determined what was more unnatural, the fact that she was left alone unattended, or that she wasn’t strapped to the bed as a safety precaution at being in a foreign place. When the panic and migraine came back too quickly, the ability to move her arms and legs faster than molasses failed to even come close. The amount of effort it took for Seanix to sit herself up and move one of her legs off the mattress left her nearly panting, her head hanging and her eyes going to the floor as her lungs shook off the last of the drug-induced fatigue.
 
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