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Caliborn Gets Some Drawing In

Summary:

Absolutely nothing felt better than running on empty.

51/365

Notes:

(See the end of the work for notes.)

Work Text:

Absolutely nothing felt better than running on empty. Caliborn was 3 hours in on sleep and Ritalin and a can of Monster Energy and he was jazzed up, he was feeling wired, his heart felt like it was about to explode, and he was, as the saying went, hyperfocused as fuck. Wake up at 11 AM, pop a little chalky white pill that you normally use during school hours but now it's summer vacation and there's no such restriction, proceed to space out like a fucking art maniac for the next ten hours while forgetting to feed yourself. Eat, continue until 5 AM, go to sleep, wake up. That was how it went, over and over again, just the way he liked it.

His palms were covered in a thin sheen of sweat while he worked, wearing the nub of his tablet pen down to the bone until it leaked pixel blood onto his modern-day dungeon walls, scrawling out "Abandon all hope ye who enter here" - just like the very cool death metal band logo shirt hanging over his door as an impromptu curtain. You know, to curtail snooping sisters and father figures.

The other day Caliborn found a complete manuscript on his nightstand. He had no recollection of writing it, and, assuming it was his sister's, gleefully burnt it in the fireplace. That was a fun good 3 minutes of casual arson before he got bored of it and went back to his daily routine.

Caliborn's blood felt like sludge in his veins. If he wasn't so pumped up from the maximum art skill he was busy displaying to the online world, repetitively throwing his sludge into the internet tarpits and allowing it to fester M-W-F for an adoring audience of shitposters, he would possibly recognize this sensation as something close to an anxiety attack. But Caliborn didn't get anxiety, was what he told himself, and when he did he just ate the anxiety and turned it into fuel for his art. Anxiety made the best webcomics, after all. Anxiety and Ritalin and sleep deprivation, that was the concoction to making the perfect webcomic.

It was incomprehensible. Avant-garde. Challenging. Brutal. Caliborn could update it at any time outside his typical schedule and frequently went dark for long periods of time while he made elaborate and incredibly crappy animations and long sequences of events. All of the music, he composed on one of those kiddy MIDI keyboards that only made animal noises, and his absurd, 200% sincere devotion to one of the most compellingly awful webcomics ever loosed onto the internet earned him a small but slavishly devoted fanbase, including a single cosplayer of his garish, anime-esque protagonist. Just one cosplayer, and that was all Caliborn needed to feel fulfilled, like a king, like he could die happy in life.

Whipping around, Caliborn grabbed his airsoft gun off his desk and shot a pellet at a nearby balloon, setting off a loud, rattling, complicated Rube Goldberg machine that inevitably caused two things to happen. One, it would drop a Hersey's Kiss tied to a small plastic army man onto his forehead, as a way to remind him to eat. Two is that it would snake into the air vents and punch a little tape recorder to play pre-recorded noises of scuttling rats in the vents of his sister's room.

Turning back to his tablet, he was rudely interrupted by a piece of candy dropping onto his head, causing him to grunt with displeasure before he realized that the candy he just ordered had arrived. He took the Hershey's Kiss, leftover from Valentine's Day so it was the kind filled with the little chocolate creme stuff that made his throat hurt and his tongue itch, and delicately unwrapped it, before squishing the wrapper into a tiny little ball and flicking it into his desk trashcan. Then, he bit the tip off the confection, scooped the creme filling out delicately with his teeth, and finished the rest of it after that.

Like an Oreo, but more satisfying. Would only be better if it was filled with real fake blood, or maybe like raspberry jam or something like that.

Caliborn bobbed his head lightly to loud-enough-to-make-his-sister-complain Metallica, drawing out another crude panel of LORD ENGLISH, MOTHERFUCKER UNLIMITED, GOD OF HYPERDEATH, SEXY BISHONEN.

Yeah. That's the stuff. Another page down.

Notes:

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