Assigned Blog Post 03 - Quinn Marksley

Quinn Marksley was a bit odd, or at least his fading mother definitely thought he was. She was in her mid-90's, and although she sometimes took a while to figure out who Quinn was, who she was, and how they were related, she would always remember he was messed up when she did get that all worked out.

It was a complete mystery how she could possibly survive so long with a son like Quinn. As far as she could remember (about 4 days if she concentrated really hard), he was essentially some strange man with the soul of a six year-old who lived in the basement of her home reenacting scenes from the Pokémon TV shows using his infinite collection of Pokémon cards. No, really, he lived there. He feared all people, even his mother at times, and thus he never left that basement (he shut her up in some tiny room; it wasn't hard because she couldn't move at all beyond random twitching). He had no job but the one he made for himself, and those reenactments didn't exactly pay . . . at all, but the family had enough food in the basement to last through a nuclear holocaust followed by an ice age (and that wasn't counting whatever sustenance may have been upstairs).

Sometimes people would ring the doorbell for who-knows-what, then after a few seconds without reply, they would leave. One time, however, someone was able to pull off a whole 17 minutes and 3 seconds, at which point Quinn Marksley had become so distracted that he couldn't even emulate Rattata's battle cry. So Quinn actually went up the stairs and opened the door.

In front of him was an upright mop. A mop dressed in a gargantuan sport coat with a fake-looking golden nametag. On the tag lived an impressive collection of grime that probably would have taken a normal person a lifetime to gather, but through the smudges Quinn thought he could see the outline of a few words. From what he could tell after staring at the tag for a little over a minute at point-blank range, they said: Oswin St. George, CEO. He looked up and noticed that what he had been staring at was not, in fact, a mop. It was a person whose hair could have passed as the long-lost brother of the tattered stick that Quinn's mother used to use to wash down what she could reach of Quinn's room (when he still lived in his own room). Quinn staggered back in fear as the mop's face revealed an otherworldly void which, given a larger body on the other end, probably could have consumed Quinn in under five minutes. From the void came a sound that Quinn instinctively interpreted as a battle cry.

OSWIN ST. GEORGE

:L6

HP:

Quinn

:L7

HP:

FIGHT	P K M N
ITEM	RUN

TACKLE

GROWL

LEER

BITE

TYPE /

20

/

25

(click on the inner box above to begin. note: javascript must be enabled)

Congratulations on completing one ending of this interactive post! There are currently a total of 6 possible endings to achieve. See if you can figure all of them out.

Alternatively, if you don't want to deal with finding how to get each ending, click to see all of them.

[ run away ]

Using all of his energy, Quinn quickly jumped back and slammed the door in the mop's face before the it could get the chance to even taste him. As he caught his breath, he reflected on what he'd just done. He actually climbed all the way up the stairs and heaved the door open. Not only that, he even managed to jump! Proud with what he'd accomplished that day, he went back into his basement and continued his work.

[ finish off Oswin using BITE ]

Quinn loosed his jaws of steel from the mop and took a step back in shock. Apparently the mop was a person after all. The person began to stir; he seemed to have regained consciousness as Quinn surveyed him. Quinn's mother had taught him good manners, so Quinn Marksley invited the strange man inside and apologized by serving him lunch. He even went so far as to tear open a package of his favorite rice seasoning, rendering the limited-edition Pokémon-print packaging completely worthless. That was how bad Quinn felt for attacking the man. Even though he was scared of all people, he gave up one of his 34,781 remaining seasoning packets. The man, whose name actually turned out to be Oswin St. George, thanked Quinn for going through all that trouble for him, then explained that he was looking for someone at Quinn's address whom he'd met through an online dating service. Quinn told him that only he and his mother lived in the house, then came up with a great idea.

Quinn went downstairs, tugging on Oswin's sleeve to get him to follow, and opened up the accordion-style doors to the basement closet. Inside lay Quinn's mother, at whose sight Oswin managed to jump, something that had been rendered impossible after he became addicted to food at the age of seven, and had remained impossible after he simply stopped eating (believe it or not, muscles don't grow too well when one stops eating). Quinn was about to introduce her when she twitched. Oswin involuntarily twitched in return. Quinn tried to get Oswin's attention, even using BITE on him again, but he was lost. He'd finally found someone with as many folds of skin as he had, even if they were completely devoid of flesh (unlike his, which still retained more than some of the fat he'd accumulated during his obese years). He stared at the old woman, and she stared back, whether it was because she actually saw him and acknowledged his presence or because she simply couldn't move her eyes anymore. At the sight of this grotesque scene, Quinn instinctively used BITE once again, and this time he happened to hit Oswin's neck. Oswin collapsed on the floor and Quinn dragged him up the stairs and out the still-open door. As he turned the knob for the sixth deadbolt, Quinn reflected on what he'd just done. He found that his fear of all people turned out to be legitimate. People were just messed up sometimes, as had been the case with Oswin St. George. So Quinn went back down the stairs, picked up that Rattata card, and resumed the episode.

[ finish off Oswin using TACKLE ]

Quinn opened his eyes and looked down at the body over which lay his own. He immediately regretted having done so. Indeed, what he had just tackled was not a mop. What had previously appeared to be the grain of the wood that would have made up the handle was now clearly exposed to Quinn as the neck of a person. That neck was covered with so many folds of skin that, if stretched out to full capacity, probably could have substituted for his mother's blankets (after all, the skin appeared to hole sufficient corpulence to keep such a frail woman warm through the entirety of the ice age that would follow the nuclear holocaust).

Quinn tried to right himself so as to avoid getting sucked into the layers, but to no avail. Like quicksand, any attempt to pull free only dragged Quinn further into the depths. As he gasped for one last breath of air that hadn't been made stagnant by years of sweat accumulation, he reflected on what he'd just done. He feared all people, even his mother at times, and thus . . . he decided to use TACKLE on a complete stranger who popped up at his door and stood there for 17 minutes and 3 seconds ringing the bell? What sense did that make? Quinn thought about it for a second, then he realized two things. The first was that he'd been spending the last 30 years, if not more, under the control of a foreign organization whose goal was to manipulate children to become uneducated, unemployed dependents who served only as beings for others to look down upon. On the bright side, he'd been part of an elaborate conspiracy, something that doesn't happen every day. The second realization was that that second he'd spent thinking was the last one during which he would see any light. The void that opened before the start of the fight was only a decoy. The netherworld to which it led actually had other, more sinister ways of pulling in more matter, and he'd just been entrapped in one. Quinn stopped breathing, knowing that death would surely be the only escape from the fate of an eternity spent in this vast nothingness . . .

[ get beaten by Oswin ]

Oswin St. George looked over the mangled figure that just attacked him. He then looked around. No one was watching. He looked once again at the address on the sticky note he held in his hand, slightly torn as a result of the battle he just ended. Ah, so he was one house off. He turned around and made his way over to the next house on the street, to find the person he'd met in an online dating service. At the edge of the whacked man's driveway, Oswin turned and saw that he was still limp and sprawled on the ground. Oh well, if anyone asked, he was the one who attacked Oswin first. Oswin climbed the steps of the neighbor's house and started ringing the doorbell.

[ get beaten by Oswin, but Oswin faints from recoil ]

.   .   .

A blonde woman wearing a puppy print apron appeared from around the corner of the house, holding a hand rake and a small shovel. She saw Quinn and Oswin sprawled on her porch, then peered inside her house and saw the dust-blanketed basement hatch wide open. Then she came to an epiphany upon studying the signature red hat that must have fallen off of Quinn's head when he fell. Apparently the constant Pokémon sounds she heard throughout the day weren't coming from her neighbor's kids' TV as she had thought. As it turned out, there were people who had been living in the basement of her home since before she purchased it.

The young woman continued to survey the two unconscious men who lay on her porch as if they'd been tossed there. In time she noticed that the larger of the two men was grasping a small slip of paper. With some effort, she pried it from his still-warm fingers and began to open it up, fearing the worst. She read her name on the paper and instinctively let out a small sound that probably would have made any passerby think the puppies on her apron were alive. She dropped the paper and lowered her gaze once again toward the pile of skin, bones, and clothing at her feet. This simply would not do. No, she had to leave at once.

Too scared to reenter the house that apparently wasn't hers, she jerked open the door of her sky-blue Volkswagen Beetle and flung herself inside, shutting and locking the door behind her in less than three and a half seconds. She glanced out the window and thought she saw something stirring from the now-distant porch of her former home. Still staring, she navigated her hands through her purse with the precision and speed of a surgeon working to save a patient with a gunshot wound to the head, and grasped onto the pikachu charm attached to her cell phone. She randomly moved her thumb over the keypad and jammed it into whatever speed dial number her subconscious decided to choose. Just as she watched the basement-dwelling creature rise from the porch and mouth something that looked like, "AUGH WON MAH BOOGÉMAN CAR," her best friend Wendy answered the phone and said, "Hey, girl, what's up?"

The creature took a groggy step in her direction and she screamed.

[ Oswin faints from recoil ]

Quinn looked on in awe as he saw his opponent fall in front of him, clearly too strained to continue the match. So Quinn turned around on his heel and went back inside, careful to shut the door behind him. As he went back down the stairs, he reflected on what had just happened. A mop stood on its own for a whole 17 minutes and 3 seconds, at which point Quinn opened the door. After a brief exchange, the mop fell over, most likely damaging either itself or the house's already dilapidated porch. It wasn't Quinn's fault. It was the mop's fault. It simply didn't have the willpower to go up against Quinn, and Quinn was clearly a higher level than the mop, yet it had decided to challenge him anyway. Realizing this, Quinn closed his eyes in silence, in quiet appreciation of the mop's commendable outpouring of courage during those 17 minutes and 3 seconds that would have been too long for anyone else to stand. Then he went back to work on the episode he'd been reenacting before the interruption.

[ written using the character Oswin St. George from this post on Genre Whiplash ]