Cold. The mass of clay was so cold against her face. So cold that she was freezing, turning into a statue of numbness. The girl was too numb to even cry out as she was thrown to the ground by the giant tentacle. Soon she was falling...falling...falling...

It was some kind of late and Twyla Ashby was some kind of freaked out. Every time she closed her eyes she got images of slimy tentacles and felt like she was suffocating. When people like Henri or the fox girl, Ruby asked her why she was so tired she'd tell them 'Stuff' and that she'd 'get over it'. She wasn't getting over it. If anything that Stuff was growing at an alarming rate. The nightmares were becoming more frequent and no matter what she tried to distract herself with she never got a good night's sleep. Not even thinking about her brother coming home made her forget the monster and if she thought about Maya/Gawain before she fell asleep she/he would turn up in her dreams, playing out an even more twisted plot.

This night she'd fallen out of bed for what seemed like the millionth time that week and had decided as she lay there, curled in a ball, on the floor that she was not sleeping again that night. Apparently for a certain blond teen that meant sneaking around the Mansion after sensible people had gone to bed. She told herself she was practicing her stealth skills--but who needed stealth against a giant clay monster? Or against a school of presumably sleeping kids for that matter. Twyla as being rather silly, and she knew it as she crept half camouflaged through the living room, paranoid at the slightest sound.

Maybe the lack of sleep was getting to her?

Or maybe everything just seemed scarier in the dead of night after you've had a nightmare? Twyla liked that theory best. What she was doing was distracting herself, focusing on other things so that Cthulhu couldn't creep up on her. She was just messing around, after all. Not that she liked the idea of getting caught doing a ridiculous half crawl through her school. That would be very embarrassing. The only thing that would make it more embarrassing was if--

Thud In all of her musings and creepings Twyla had forgotten one very important fact: the living room contained furniture. She managed to trip and fall over the leg of a coffee table, sending herself sprawling into a pile of carpet colored pajamas.

Tank yawned and squinted at the paused screen. Forcing his eyes open he looked for the bottle of red bull he had bought that afternoon. He scoured through the mess at his feet, empty chip packets, pizza boxes, blankets and more littered the floor all around him and he couldn't seem to find that damn half drunk bottle or red bull! Suddenly his foot kicked something that felt like glass and he reached to to retrieve his prize. He unscrewed the lid and tipped back the rest of the bottle in on big skull. Rolling his neck he hopped back onto his softy bouncy, new mattress and picked back up the controller.

He looked back at the screen, it was the pause menu of Forza Motorsport 3, one of the games he had purchased when he bought this second hand xbox and tv from a guy on ebay. He focused himself and unpaused the game, getting back on the gas to drive through the corner on the wide line he had chosen. Now the tougher bit, coming right up behind the leader as the car in front let its line head wider, Tom dabbed at the brakes and ducked back inside for a perfect switch back move to take the lead. Sitting in his room in the middle of the night playing this game sure was exciting, especially with such high difficulty settings, it made it even harder to concentrate on all of the delicate accelerator control he needed to pull off. One little mistake and he'd be in the sand trap backwards before he could say boo.

His eyes narrowed as he pushed his braking later, and back onto the gas...
THUNK!
Having one's room right next to the lounge did have disadvantages. The noise threw Tank for a second and his car bounced off of a concrete wall at eighty miles an hour. Looking at the dented, limping mess on the screen, the boy swore under his breath and quit the race before dropping the controller and standing back up. He quietly turned the door nob and eased the door open, peeking through. He saw nothing immediately and decided to go out to investigate further. He opened the door a little wider and checked each way before he crept out of his room, one ipod headphone in, one dangling on his chest.

He stalked through the lounge, fighting for vision as he stared at the murky black mess that surrounded him. He place one foot and lifted the other to take another step when it caught on something. He tumbled face first onto... well, onto something anyway. Tank had no idea what it was, all he knew was that he was lucky he hadn't hit his head on the sharp edges of that damn coffee table. Dumb thing. He must have caught his foot on the edge of it, or the rug, or something. He shrugged off the impact as though it was nothing and put his hands down to push himself back up to his feet. That was when it got weird.

His fingertips felt the soft material of what he thought at the time was the carpet, but it was in the wrong place. It was too high, like there was a thirty centimeter high lump in the carpet. The boy frowned and squinted into the darkness. Now that he really peered, there was some kind of shape there. He poked it once and it squished slightly. Then he jabbed his finger at it again, and felt skin. Human skin, like on a person skin. He leaped back and scuttled across the floor on his back.
Why was there an invisible person sleeping beside the coffee table?!

OOC: Moving into a new place so I might not have internet for a while, hopefully it'll only be gone for a couple of days, but it could be up to a week or two. Anyway, I'll be back on as soon as I can.

It was kinda nice, laying on the carpet. It would have been an ideal place to crash if not for the fibers the tickled Twyla's nose or the fact that it was very, very dark in the living room. So dark that the girl imagines monsters circling her, their paws padding so quietly across the carpet that she couldn't hear them. Soon the girl was laying limp on the floor, afraid to move for fear of the imagined creatures that were obviously stalking her amidst the couches and end tables of the living room.

And then she heard the steps.

Somewhere in the back of her mind Twyla knew that she was making up the monsters. There was subconscious comfort in knowing that your imagination was getting the best of you. Any comfort the girl had felt was gone as soon as she heard the quiet steps on the carpet. Oh my God, I'm going to die. She could almost feel the chill of cold clay on her skin as she waited for the monster to find where she lay camouflaged on the floor.

And then it didn't.

Suddenly, a pressing weight landed on Twyla's limp frame, causing the girl to let out an "Ooof!" in surprise that was covered up by the noise the Thing made as it thudded onto her and the floor. Whatever the Thing was, it wasn't the icy cold clay that was Cthulhu--it was a warm Thing. A moment later the weight redistributed and there were two spots of pressure on her back. They felt like hands, not tentacles--no clay monster, just some Mansion student...hopefully.

A Mansion student with no sense of personal space. "Hey! Stop that!" The sudden decrease in fear left Twyla irritable as she was prodded and poked by some kid. "Watch the hands." She batted at the foes, barely visible in the dim light of the room. Twyla scooted on her back in order to get away from the kid and his/her searching hands (that had crossed a few of Twyla's boundaries, mind you). Her skin was still the same color of the carpet as she sat up and rested her head against the coffee table.

((OOC: ALright, thanks for letting me know. happy move!))