"It's Called 'Hungry, Hungry Hippos'" Tiffany said, pulling the board game out of the closet of her bedroom and placing it neatly on the floor in front of Delilah in one, graceful movement.

Delilah was sitting on the floor, Indian style, at the Wilson's house where Tiffany, Michael and Anthony lived. She had been here more than a few times, but like everything else, she had never been here before.

Tiffany was 'the smart one', according to group definitions. And it was known that Delilah would often spend time at Tiffany's during the summertime. Tiffany loved to dismiss her older brother's opinions in a brutal and uncaring fashion. There was something about this rugged, ruthlessness that created mutual respect between Tiffany and Delilah. Though, admittedly, Tiffany lacked the cruelness of Delilah's sister, Susan.

However, all of these things were both true, and not true at all because of the wish that Delilah made which had changed her own world.

"Do you want to play?" Tiffany asked.

Delilah smirked and nodded once.

"I get the pink one."

Delilah liked Tiffany more than she liked most people. But the girl could be a snot sometimes. Especially when it came to games. Neither of them liked to lose, but Delilah could see no way that Tiffany could outsmart her in a game like this.

Is this before "meeting" Shawn or Bradford?

OOC: Assume this occurs after meeting both Shawn and Bradford

"OK." Tiffany agreed, sitting down sitting across to the Blue Hippo.

She reached across to the dresser, almost threatening to fall over since she was sitting Indian style. Then she opened the drawer and fidgeted her hand around in it, before withdrawing what looked to be a muffin.

"What some? I mean, before we start. It's good." She said, taking a bite.

Delilah snatched at the muffin. She'd eat the whole thing. It didn't matter if it had been bitten already. Didn't matter if it tasted good. It was food.

It tasted just as good as it looked. The top was light and fluffy. The inside was spongy and sweet. Looking up after devouring the muffin, Delilah saw Tiffany reach into the drawer again to pull out another muffin. She didn't seem upset or angry at Delilah's action of eating everything. To the contrary, she seemed delighted at having someone to eat food with.

Tiffany bit down on the muffin and then placed her hand on the blue Hippo.

"OK, ready when you are."

OOC: Composure + Wits + 3

"Ready!"

Delilah licked the last crumbs away from her mouth. Her hand was over the pink hippo and her game face was on.

07:06, Today: Delilah Gray rolled 2 successes using 6d10 with the World of Darkness nWoD system with a target of 8, rerolling 10s with rolls of 3,9,2,1,9,7.  Wits + Composure + 3 = Hungriest Hippo!

22:20, Today: Shawn's Neighbor - Tiffany Wilson failed (no successes) using 3d10 with the World of Darkness nWoD system with a target of 8, rerolling 10s ((3,6,3)).

The Hippos snapped up the white marbles as Delilah pounded the lever down. Tiffany was chewing the entire time, slamming her own hand down on the lever. After less than a minute, the marbles were spinning and bouncing off the barriers, each girl trying to time the plastic mouth of their own Hippo to intercept the last remaining marbles as they crossed the center. Finally, with a slamming sound, Delilah's at the last one. Looking over at the totals, it was clear that Delilah had won.

"WHAT!!!?" Tiffany suddenly yelled.

OOC: Delilah gains +1 to next degeneration roll for a total of +2

"HA!"

Delilah punched the air with both fists. Then she rocked back on her heels with a sigh.

"Guess it takes more than eating like a hippo to win. At least you got good practice."
This message was last edited by the player at 09:15, Tue 13 Feb 2018.

"I hate this game!" Tiffany announced and she slapped the side of 'Hungry Hungry Hippos' game board aside spilling marbles across the rug, and sending the whole thing upside down.

"It's Stupid!" She yelled, folding her arms in the classic pose of a sore loser.

Delilah was all smiles and ready to play (and win) again. Then Tiffany didn't want to play anymore. That was the worst.

"Doesn't mean you have to be stupid."

Her expression was also sour now. She pouted with her lip out, but didn't offer to help clean up.

"You got any other games that aren't stupid, then?"

"I hate playing." Tiffany whined. "And when you say that you make me very, VERY ANGRY!" she shouted.

She pointed a quivering finger at Delilah. A figure that was shaking with the bitterness of loss, rage and anger and being a sore loser all the more making her tantrum ready to explode.

"I DON'T LOSE!!" She yelled, rejecting the concept. "I don't lose to you." She announced, as if losing to Delilah specifically was beneath her.

"Oh yeah? Well, you just did!" Delilah answered hotly. She picked up a marble and threw it at Tiffany. "So there!"

That action shut Tiffany right up. It was easy to hit Tiffany, because she was right in front of Delilah. The marble bounced off the girls chest and then clanked to the floor, rolling under the bed.

"Stupid-head!" Tiffany shouted at Delilah. But Delilah noticed that Tiffany didn't reach to throw a marble back. Instead, she got to her feet and shouted

"I'M NEVER GONNA WIN AT THIS STUPID GAME!!" And she kicked the Hungry Hippo game board, sending it flying across the floor. It did a flip, sending marbles showering across her bed before landing against the dresser.

Her fists were tight against her sides, clenched and rigid.

Delilah lobbed another marble at Tiffany.

"A'course not."

And another marble.

"Can't win if you quit."

Delilah chucked one after another. She raised her voice in a sing song to tease.

"My name is Tiffany and I'm a peepants crybaby quitter. Waaaah."

Delilah grinned from ear to ear. This was almost as much fun as the game.

OOC: Delilah regains +1 Willpower: Cruel

"WahhhHHH!" Tiffany yelled. It was hard to see for a moment whether Tiffany was enraged, or simply crying from being picked on.

But after a few moments, Delilah's experience kicked in.

It was definitely a cry of not liking what Delilah was doing.  Delilah had heard that before.
This message had punctuation tweaked by the player at 03:06, Sat 17 Feb 2018.

Delilah tensed and dropped the marble she was holding. Her eyes flicked to the doorway. If Tiffany's parents caught her now, they would send her home. There was no real food at home. Plus, she wanted to show off for one of Tiff's brothers while avoiding the other.

"SHH! Calm down! You just have to hit the tail part right."

She didn't want to clean up the mess, but she felt she had to at this point. Delilah set the board right side up and plucked some marbles up.

OOC: Delilah Rolls Wits + Empathy with the following results:

0 Successes: Things have gone too far. Tiffany can't seem to stop crying!

1 Success: Delilah manages to reduce the crying to a mere sob. Eventually Tiffany manages to keep it together

2+ Successes: Delilah manages to contain the situation by saying the right things at the right time. She learns something about Tiffany in the process.

23:41, Today: Delilah Gray failed (no successes) using 6d10 with the World of Darkness nWoD system with a target of 8, rerolling 10s ((6,6,3,7,5,1)).

Delilah frowned. She was putting the game back together. So what what was wrong with Tiffany now? It wasn't like those marbles hurt.

"Ahhhh...AH...ah...AH...ah...I...wha....wha..wha....AH..ah...AH...ah...AH...ah!" She said, unable to get past the sobs to move forward with any logical statement that meant anything.

In truth, she was a total mess. Her hair was tangle. Snot was running down her nose, cheeks flushed.

The situation was getting out of control. It was obvious that trouble--in the form of parents---was coming

...and that's when the door opened. Instead of it being an adult, it turned out to be the kid Michael. The one who never said anything.

He walked in with an expressionless glare. Eyes shifting first to Tiffany, who was still crying, and then back to Delilah. There was no judgement nor concern in his eyes.

There was nothing.

Tiffany kept bawling and Delilah kept trying to shush her. The door opened and only one of the girls stopped. Delilah squirmed under Michael's stare. She hated it. She hated his blank, retard eyes and his round, retard head. She wanted him to go way before he started speaking in his weirdo-robot voice.

Now that the door was open, Delilah was sure the fury of Tiffany's parents was coming. She would rather take her chances trying to explain the situation to their parents. At least, they would speak like regular people.

"We're not doing anything. It's just a game." she said too quickly.

"Just a game." Michael repeated, glancing over at Tiffany.

He didn't try to comfort her. He didn't ask if she was OK. None of the things that Susan would have done for her sister.

He just looked between Delilah and Tiffany one more time.

Then he slowly backed out of the room the way he came, closing the door behind him.

Tiffany was still crying, but for  some reason, there were no footfalls of parents running down the hall or yells of 'what's going on up there!?' shouted towards the room. Under any other circumstance, Delilah would have already been sent packing, a phone call made to her Dad. Or if it was school, a phone call and a trip to the principal's office. But this was a different life now.

Delilah leaned forward and listened. Her eyes narrowed, as if that would help her hear any better. It was weird that he wasn't running off to tattle, but she wasn't exactly complaining.

"Aw, pipe down. We can play again in a minute. But you gotta stop crying."

Quietly, she got up and went to the door. She opened it just a crack to see if that creep was still there.

Delilah opened the door, Tiffany still sobbing behind her.

Michael was staring blankly at her right up against the other side of the door.  Immediately, without even moving, the two kids found themselves uncomfortably in each other's spaces, though this didn't seem to phase Michael, who just stood there.

Delilah gasped and shut the door right in Michael's freaky face.

She backed away from the door and shook Tiffany's shoulder. "Tiffany! Tiffanyyyyy!"

The sudden screaming and shaking was enough to snap Tiffany out of her cry-fest. Her eyes opened wide as if Delilah's shouting was warning of an incoming danger or emergency. Delilah could watch as her expression turned from self-pity to alarm all in a matter of a second.

"Wha....wha...what?" She asked suddenly, sniffling a bit, one hand reaching up to clear her nose, the other wiping her cheeks free of tears.

"Your brother's out there. On the other side of the door. Just staring."

Tiffany had to think that was weird. Even for Michael.

"Shouldn't we...do something?"

Tiffany wiped the tears from her face and inhaled a series of post-crying gasps involuntarily. She was coming around.

"Yes." She agreed. And then. "It's just Michael. He does it because Mom says he doesn't know how to act right."

"That's why he had to get sent away for a while."

Delilah didn't understand. "Can't ya send him away now? I bet he's still there. Just listening and breathing and creeping. Doesn't it give you the willies?"

"No." Tiffany said, rubbing her eyes and responding to whether or not it bothered her. "It's just Michael. He's always been that way." She explained.

The sadness was gone from her voice now, and all that remained was the exhasperated tiredness of someone who had just run a marathon. Or in Tiffany's case, had just cried a marathon.

"Michael isn't dangerous though, so you don't have to worry. He used to be dangerous. But then he got taken away and then they fixed him so that he wasn't dangerous-broken. But they couldn't fix him completely. So now he just does that, which is what he is doing. Just staring and stuff and not being dangerous."


"No he's just in-harmful." She explained, placing particular emphasis on the last word and smiling in a way that conveyed she might be aware that Delilah didn't know what that last word meant.

Tiffany was right. Delilah spent a moment puzzling over the word.

"Inharmful? Harmful on the inside? Like, he hurts himself? That's dumb. So now he's a creepy retard instead of a scary retard? How do you know he won't turn back?"

"No, in-harmful." Tiffany corrected, moving towards the end table and taking a tissue off, dabbing her eyes and starting to blow here nose.

"It means that he isn't harmful anymore." She said with an air of arrogance, the effect slightly dampened by the fact that her eyes were red from having cried.

"The doctors said that he was OK. So he can't be the kind of retard that hurts people. Actually, I don't think he is a retard. He's just an in-harmful person who is different and doesn't know how to act."

"Nah, he's retarded. Total mongoloid."

Delilah went back to setting up the game. She rolled one of the marbles between her fingers, thinking hard.

"So he hurt people real bad? Other kids?"

"In-harmful." Tiffany objected, the war of words suddenly growing slightly. She hadn't totally given up, despite being completely humiliated through crying. Or maybe it was just the simple fact that words were where Tiffany appeared to hold a special hold over.

"But he did force rocks into a kids mouth. That's why he got in trouble." She let out a sniff, the last one perhaps, from the long cry that she had. "He stuffed rocks down a four year old's mouth in the forest. And then they said that he said 'he wouldn't be quite.' " she explained.

"Four year old babies are loud," she nodded in agreement. "But stuffing their mouths with rocks is really bad." She couldn't picture herself doing that. It sounded... Delilah wasn't sure how it sounded. She couldn't put a word to it.

But she could imagine trying to scream with the cold, dirty rocks chipping her teeth and weighing down her tongue. It gave her the shivers. She opened a hippo's mouth and rolled the marbles inside. It wasn't the same.

"And dumb. That baby must've been really scared. My sister used to be four. They get louder and louder the more you scare 'em. Mike's a real retard if he doesn't know that."
This message was last edited by the player at 00:33, Mon 26 Feb 2018.

"He's not as smart as I am." Tiffany agreed with Delilah. "But that's just as well, because no one is as smart as me."


"I'm what you call, an inter-llectual."

OOC: Delilah Rolls Intelligence + Study with the following results

0 Successes: Delilah has never heard of that word before

1 Success: Delilah understands what Tiffany is getting at

2+ Successes: Delilah understands what Tiffany is getting at and knows that Tiffany is pronouncing the word wrong

21:20, Today: Delilah Gray rolled 3 successes using 3d10 with the World of Darkness nWoD system with a target of 8, rerolling 10s.  Intelligence + Study = Vocab Quiz!

Interlectual. HA! Tiffany thought she was soooo smart. Well, Delilah reckoned she was even smarter. First off, she knew a made-up word when she heard one. And second, she could poke fun at Tiffany now...or she could save it until there was an audience. Everything was better with an audience. Delilah grinned like a cat in cream.

"How did you know that he wasn't ever going to be interlectual like you? Was it 'cause of his lumpy, bald head when he was a baby? Or did he just turn retarded over time?"

But it was hard to keep up the smile for long. Delilah rolled marbles into the hippo's mouth, one after another.

"Was that little kid hurt bad?"

Tiffany's focus appeared to be on...herself. And because of that or maybe because she didn't regard Michael that highly, there was no reaction to talk of him being a 'retard.' Then she said something that put here blatant ignoring of Delilah's jabs at Michael in context.

"Retard. Haha." It was giggle. She thought it was funny. She thought it was funny that Delilah was calling her brother a retard. Whether she would think it funny in front of others was another question. But there could be no doubt that between just two girls Tiffany was willing to entertain the joke and even more, enjoy it.

"Retarded." She said again, smiling.

Then she dropped the smile as Delilah mentioned the little kid.

"Oh....yeah." She said softly and with a tone of sadness. "I dunno." She turned away from Delilah as she spoke. "Mom said we're not supposed to talk about it." She shrugged, turning further away from Delilah and towards the drawer. She opened it again and pulled out a yellow package. It crinkled as she handled it:

Peanut M&Ms, Delilah could see.

Tiffany opened the small bag and popped a brown M&M into her mouth. Then she offered a green one to Delilah.

"I won't tell if you won't. And I won't tell that you said Regard, either."

Delilah didn't think her own mother would mind. Her parents always told her to call things as she saw them. She didn't think Tiffany's parents were the same way.

She shook her head no to the M&Ms. She'd had a big muffin, besides.

Tiffany shook  her head. But then she popped more candy in her mouth chewing loudly.

"Eh...I better not." she said. And then, trying to change the subject.

"Have you heard? There's a rumor that more kids are going to be coming to the neighborhood!"

Delilah pouted a bit when Tiffany wouldn't dish the dirt. She brightened at the thought of more kids in the neighborhood. "Yeah? Aw, that is awesome!" She didn't want to think about Michael hurting babies anymore. "I hope there's more girls. And more cute boys," she added with a wistful sigh. "And no dumb babies."

"I had a dream about it." Tiffany said confidently. "But I don't believe that dreams mean anything because they are so-real, which means that they are too strange to believe." happy to teach Delilah a new word that sounded sophisticated.


"But in my dream, the kids were trouble makers that wanted to do pranks and break stuff. I think one was a girl with glasses."


OOC: Delilah Rolls Intelligence + Study with the following results

0 Successes: Delilah has never heard of that word so-real before

1 Success: Delilah understands what Tiffany is getting at with the word so-real

2+ Successes: Delilah understands what Tiffany is getting at and knows that Tiffany is pronouncing the word so-real wrong

08:10, Today: Delilah Gray failed (no successes) using 3d10 with the World of Darkness nWoD system with a target of 8, rerolling 10s ((2,3,1)). Vocab quiz fail.

Delilah didn't understand what Tiffany meant. If the dream was so real, then it should be super believable.

"I dunno, some pranks are pretty good. But girls with glasses are usually terrible."

"Wanna go check it out?" Tiffany said. "I think I saw a moving van pull up on the corner street."

"If it's a girl with glasses that's moving in, then it would be really weird to be the same thing as my dream. But it wouldn't mean it was true. It would only be a coinsurance."

"Sure! Let's go!"

Delilah forgot about the game, but she hadn't forgotten about Michael. He might be on the other side of the door. Lurking.

"Lead the way."

OOC:  End Thread