"Who is the person you want me to stab?" Michael asked, flatly.

"Oh, I don't have a person in mind yet. It was just about being prepared, right? We'll both be prepared, you to stab, me to find a person that needs to be stabbed?" Shawn was getting awfully cavalier about the idea of stabbing someone at this point, though ultimately his goal was preventing it more than anything.

"OK." Michael said, going back to playing with one of the transformers. "What are the rules?" Michael asked.

"Hmm." Shawn tried to consider what might sound reasonable to Michael and actually be reasonable in the larger world. He had a feeling Michael wouldn't accept a blanket 'don't stab anyone'. "For now, you should only stab someone if you really think they're going to kill you. And when you stab someone, you should try to run away as fast as you can, and find a friendly adult. Or me."

Michael considered this for a moment and then nodded his head. "OK." He said. Then, without missing a beat he said:

"What should I use to stab them? A pencil will go in once or twice but is not the best thing for stabbing because it will break after that. Also, it probably won't kill. I could get a knife from the kitchen, but Mom is always watching them since I came back from Willow Grove. Maybe you can get me something better than a pencil?" He suggested, words coming out like a typewriter in a dull affect.

"That's why the pencil's a good idea - you stab them in the legs before you run away. Then if they have friends, they don't know whether to chase you or help their friend. A knife just makes people want to stop you, and you get in trouble for having it even if you don't stab people." Shawn tried to sound authoritative, like he had experience with this kind of stuff.

Michael nodded. He put down the transformer and shifted his body towards Shawn. He was fully facing him now. Scrawny legs, arms that led up to bony shoulders.

"OK." Michael said. He stared blankly at Shawn. The blank, vacant stare of a computer or robot waiting for the next part of the dialogue to initiate its program. Except his eyes. There was something deep in those wells of brown that spoke of an inner awareness perhaps. A constant, rhythmic calculation. An active mind, so far as Shawn could see, even if Michael's verbal responses were anything but.

Shawn returned the look with a chipper expression. What a lot of people didn't realize is that the majority of acting is quiet; you were looking at things, reacting to what other people say, emoting. The important thing he'd been taught was to resist the urge to fill a silence - just be patient if something didn't call for comment.

The silence lasted for a while, but Shawn was well trained in such an experience. It was just like being on a set. Waiting to draw the emotions out or waiting for the natural ebb and flow of a particular, verbal tidal-basin.

"Before I went to Willow Grove, I didn't think that I was too different. But now I know something is wrong with me." Michael advised. It wasn't a sad sense, or even that Michael cared. Rather, it seemed more like a mathematical equation. Michael didn't seemed bothered or excited by his self-assessment.

"Most people do not like me because when I say things they aren't like the things that other people say. And, I don't say many things." Again, Shawn noticed there wasn't a hint of regret or displeasure that Michael felt about this predicament, rather, it came out like a dot matrix printer - information for the user to consume.

"Is there something wrong with you? Are you a wrong person?" Michael asked, the question dropped into the conversation with all the wait of a large stone, Michael's deep voice adding weight to the question, his eyes dark and blank like the black screen of an MS-dos prompt.

"I don't know, I never went to Willow Grove." Shawn had occasionally wondered that exact question - other kids seemed to just be themselves. They were more honest; not all the time, of course, but they acted mean or foolish or selfish and didn't seem to care what other people would think of them. They didn't just tell people what they wanted to hear. They had wants and likes and dislikes, and they told people.

Shawn didn't. Shawn told people what he thought they wanted to hear, Shawn's stomach would drop at the thought of people thinking less of him, people disappointed in him. Conversations, even with people he genuinely cared about, were artificial, cynically calculated to get what he wanted without actually asking for it. Because asking for things was greedy, but manipulating them into giving them to you wasn't. Even now, when he was being halfway honest with Michael, it was because he thought he could get away with it - that Michael wouldn't judge or care, and that he wouldn't be believed if he told others. Maybe that wasn't normal, maybe that meant he was a wrong person? "I guess I might be..."
This message was last edited by the player at 15:13, Mon 07 Aug 2017.

"OK." Michael said with all the nonchalance of someone putting dishes into a dishwasher, not a care of expression on his face.

"I know that there's something wrong with me. Whenever I talk to people in groups, I end up saying things that they don't like. So, unless I have to, I don't say anything." Michael advised.

"And I like to count things." He added.

"If you're a person with something wrong with you, are you going to change? They tried to change me at Willow Grove. I went to two hundred and forty seven hours of special counseling and one thousand three hundred and twenty seven hours of group counseling. But I don't think I've changed. I don't think that I can change, no matter how many people tell me that I'm wrong."
Michael said this without concern about changing or change. He spoke as if whether he changed or not was not something that was important to him.

"I don't know. I think maybe there's some things you can change, and some things you can't change. And if there's something wrong with me, maybe it's a thing I can't change." Shawn shrugged. Even if it was a problem, he didn't really see a way to just suddenly be different.

Michael's lips moved again, as Shawn spoke, the sign of counting as his eyes remained fixed on Shawn's lips.

"You said 'I' three times." He told Shawn, the sentence coming out almost automatically, like the indentation of a paragraph before a practiced writer starts an essay. Then, he responded to Shawn with another question.

"I don't like change." Michael announced. "Everything should just stay the same as always. Everything should be just like it was at Willow Creek, where the rules are understood and if you break the rules or do something that is outside of the rules, everyone knows what will happen." He explained.

"You said that there could be something wrong with you. But at Willow Grove they have a rule that says that to have something wrong, you have to do bad things. 'Things' means more that one thing. So, I put exactly eight rocks in the little kid's mouth. I did eight things wrong, even if it was just one little kid. It didn't feel wrong. Eight is just a number. It isn't different than any other number, and it isn't special. But it is more than five and less than ten." Michael explained.

"What bad things did you do." Michael asked. "If you only did one bad thing, there might not be anything wrong with you." He reasoned.

"I think...I've done more than one bad thing." Shawn wasn't going to elaborate further, and with Michael's literal-mindedness, there was probably a 50/50 chance he'd accept that answer without further explanation.

"More than one means that it could be two, or three, or even more. If it was just the numbers on a die, it could be between two and six bad things that you did. If you did more than six really bad things, then you wouldn't be able to roll a die, because it only goes up to six dots."

"You should try counting the number of bad things you did with marks on a wall if it was a lot. Each mark should be as long as your finger. Once you reach four marks, the very next mark should go across the four lines you made, to make five. Then, each five things you did bad could be counted easily: Five, ten, twenty--and however many extra marks you have." Michael recommended.

"That's a good idea, I'll have to try it when I get home!" Shawn really  didn't want to think about all the bad things he'd done, but he wanted to humour Michael. He was weird, but not in a really bad way.

Michael nodded without saying anything. It was like the conversation had been resolved in his mind. He did not turn his attention to his toys, the transformers around him now neatly arranged in rows of three just like they had been on the shelf.

He stared at Shawn, his eyes dark, expression a mask of rock. He sat there, oblivious to, or indifferent to the silence that seemed to encompass the room, clearing out the peripheral vision of the boys. It was like the silence between Shawn and Michael was suddenly put under a microscope, a bridge of heavy tension, the type Shawn was familiar with because he had been on stage or in front of a camera so many, many times.

And so Michael just sat there staring at Shawn, waiting.

Shawn carefully set down Bumblebee on the floor with the other transformers, lined up to match where it would have been on the shelf. He embraced the quiet, letting Michael decide whether he wanted to fill it on his own time.

It was a long time before anything was spoken. Longer than the longest scene without lines or practiced words that Shawn had filmed. Then again, this wasn't a movie.

Michael's mouth started to move, lips clearly counting as he looked down at the transformers, eyes darting across the rows back and forth like a typewriter as he counted all the toys.

"Transformers." He finally stated in a flat tone, deep voice. "More than meets the eye."


It didn't sound like the cartoon. More like a boring monotone.

"Robots in disguise!" Shawn tried to match his delivery to the cartoon theme song's diction and pitch.

Michael blinked. After a while, he started to speak again. This time, about a different topic. Or rather, a different question.

"Do you want to go back now?" He asked. "This is the longest I have sat with a person close to my age in years and months for a very long time. Usually this would be too much time for one person to sit in the same place with me. We have been in this room for over twenty minutes. At Willow Grove, we were allowed to have play time. But two kids in the protective ward were usually monitored closely by at least two adults. There are no adults in this room right now. And it has been longer than the amount of time that two kids from the protective ward would have been able to play together without supervision."

"I've played with friends longer before, but if you're not used to it, we can go back downstairs. I don't mind." Shawn gave Michael a cheerful smile.

"We have to go back downstairs" Michael said, clearly not comfortable with the situation and the ill-defined rules of play.

He got up and organized all of the transformers.  "Want me to show you something? Some place cool?"

Shawn watched Michael move the transformers around, trying to see if he could understand the pattern of organisation so maybe he could give him a hand. "Sure, I like cool things."

OOC: Shawn Joins Thread

Shawn: It's Not Allowed