OOC: Please consider Lucas Cable, Starblaydia's 31 year-old Goalkeeper, as my entry for the World XI Challenge. Lucas has 'Temporal Perceptual Disorder' a.k.a. Chronosensory Acuity, prophetic ability or, simply, 'the crazies'. This has been mentioned before, in these two DBC25 RPs. He's also a pretty good goalie (which helps).
He didn't play games, and the others had learned to not bother asking him. While everyone else was playing as themselves - playing with themselves? - on the latest version of that damned behemoth of an NS World Cup '82 game and mashing the sprint and through-ball buttons on the controller like there would be no tomorrow, Lucas Cable was concentrating on the past. It wasn't 2182 in Lucas' world, like it was outside, but the Tenth Century. Or the Sixteenth, or Eighteenth, or First, or whenever else he happened to be reading about. For all his interest in what had come before, Lucas was never the person to ask what date it was, or even what time it was. He had always seemed to other like he lacked a firm grip on the concept of time. Sometimes he would arrive an hour late, sometimes hours early. He'd get the day of certain events wrong and could spend hours doing nothing before five minutes of frenetic energy. They just said he was a crazy goalkeeper; it wasn't like he had anything to diagnose.
It was only on the football pitch where Lucas' failing helped him. He played every minute like it was the most important thing in the world. From the first to the ninetieth he treated every second exactly the same. There were no lapses in concentration either side of Half Time for Lucas; there were no injury time nerves to worry about. The match was simply the match, and it seemed like the only time he ever really concentrated was when he was standing between the goalposts.
In his mind he was standing there now. The pitch was spread out before him, long and wide. It was night-time, and the floodlights were on, bathing everything around him in a stark white glow, casting four shadows across the pitch. The grass was short and sharp, prickling the underside of his feet. That was odd.
He looked down at his dirty, worn feet. They looked like they hadn't been washed in a month. That wasn't the concerning thing, though, it was the shackles binding his feet that drew his eye. Dull, hard metal around his ankles with a metal chain lying heavily between them. He guessed that the chain wasn't long enough to allow him to take a full stride before the shackles would cut his movement off. The heavy bruising and grazed skin, glistening slightly with recent, drying blood attested to that. He wondered why his feet were bound like an ancient criminal, when it was 2182 and they weren't supposed to do things like that in this day and age. Or was it?
The sound of movement made him look up; he saw row upon row of soldiers in front of him. Wearing black uniforms with obvious body armour and black helmets that covered their faces. Their rifles were across their chests, marching in unison. Explosions went off around them and the sky was lit up by smoke and fireballs but the soldiers kept marching towards him. An endless march in perfect step they strode towards his goal, the goal he protected. What could he do, so small and helpless against an army?
A football shot towards him, towards his goal. Instinctively he leaped to his right to save it. As he pushed off with his feet, the shackles caught him viciously around the ankles and he fell hard, crashing to the ground before he even knew it. He doubled over to rub the pain away from his ankles as another ball flew past him with the sound of man made plastic football technology sliding across the netting at high speed. In order to stand up he had to tale his weight on his hands, swing his feet under him and stand up straight. Two more footballs had flown into the net and the soldiers were still marching towards him. He saw purple banners amid their ranks, waving proudly in the face of fire and death.
Lucas managed to parry the next ball that came his way, deflecting it with a two-handed punch high, high into the air. He caught the next one. With the ball in his hands he yelled at the soldiers, now twenty or so yards away. They were still coming. He yelled at them to stop, he begged and pleaded with them to halt their march before they ran him over, pushed him into the net and enveloped him.
There was only one way.
With all his might, Lucas threw the ball at one of the faceless masked soldiers in the line in front of him. It struck him on the helmet, knocking it to the ground with the crack of hard plastic breaking. The solider hadn't even flinched. Lucas looked at his face, and saw blood streaming from the soldiers mouth, still closed in grim determination.
All the soldiers had blood coming from their mouth, it was everywhere. It flowed down their chins and over their clothes and onto the grass in a never-ending scarlet torrent. It pooled on the grass like puddles of red mud as the soldiers continued to march towards him. There was absolutely nothing Lucas could do to stop them.
He sank to his knees. He put his hands to his face.
He cried.
