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applesaucedream2015-07-31 06:16 pm
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Entry tags:
- character: asmodia antarion,
- character: daine sarrasri,
- character: eliot waugh,
- character: greta baker,
- character: iman asadi,
- character: johnny truant,
- character: peeta mellark,
- character: rashad durant,
- character: sunshine,
- character: the balladeer,
- dropped: daniel jackson,
- dropped: jay merrick,
- dropped: mako mori,
- dropped: nicholas rush,
- dropped: tim wright,
- party post,
- retired: aziraphale,
- retired: melanie,
- retired: peter vincent,
- retired: yuri kostoglodov
We Are Awakened With The Axe [Open to All]

The city has been abandoned.
Its infrastructure has been slowly deteriorating for quite some time, now. Traffic has long since ground to a permanent halt, taxis and trucks rusting by the curbs or abandoned mid-intersection. Most of the ground-floor windows have been shattered. Electricity is spotty, if it can be found at all. The eerie silence is broken only by the wind, the calls of crows, or the gentle collapse of some structure or other. And, of course, the occasional screams.
The city has been abandoned, but it is not empty.
What caused the various outbreaks hardly matters. Viral infection, fungal infection, some new or ancient bacterium suddenly released into the general populace - who knows? What does matter is that the city has become home to thousands if zombies, some slow, some fast, some mindless, some retaining a savage kind of intelligence. And they are all so, so hungry.
There are weapons to be found or improvised, and places to hide if you're lucky enough to come across someplace well-fortified and otherwise empty. Others have clearly had the same idea, leaving hastily constructed barricades in some places. You might even take those as a blessing, if the conspicuous absence of the original builders doesn't bother you.
One thing is certain: if you don't want to succumb to whatever plagues have ravaged this place, you will have to fight for your survival.
[OOC: usual dream party rules apply; all are welcome to participate, and characters can remember or forget at the players' discretion. Also, usual zombie rules apply: if you get bitten, you'll be turned into the sort of zombie that bit you. Whether your characters deal with comically dim shamblers or the terrifying sprinty variety is up to you.
Finally, let's just go ahead and say tw: violence and gore for the post as a whole, because it's gonna get messy, folks.]
no subject
"Yes," he says. "Well."
He regards the hand extended toward him uncertainly, debating its purpose and the intent behind the gesture before he may conclude that she intends to lead him in a very literal, very physical sense, that which would result in little more than a somatosensory nightmare.
"Fine," he says, edged and wary, eyes flicking away from the hand in silent disregard for the unspoken offer. "We move slow."
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Melanie approaches the doorway at a slow creep, more for demonstrative purposes than because it's necessary out here. Inside, it's a different story. There's a dilapidated entryway featuring a toppled bin and a row of dusty mailboxes. There are two hallways to choose from, but one only extends a few feet before the floor opens into a jagged-edged hole. She might be able to edge around it, but Nick probably couldn't. She leads him into the other.
Down at the far end, the hungries are immediately visible. They stand like statues in the back doorway, completely still except for the faint stirring of their tattered clothing. She points to them, keeping her motions smooth and easy. Then she points to a second doorway, this one half the hall's distance away. The stairs.
She finishes by lifting her finger to her lips. Then, she starts down the hall, choosing each step carefully.
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Apparently this would be an environment with which she would be exceptionally familiar. This makes complete sense given her explanation for the state of her native D-brane.
The stillness of the silhouettes at the end of the hall provokes a faint chill, which he ignores utterly. The breeze continues its intermittent directional vector, pulling the clothing of the static figures in a continuous catch and flutter.
Rush dips his head in a careful nod and looks away.
That's not a lingering image he needs.
He takes care to place his feet in as similar a configuration as hers as possible, in avoidance of the inevitable creaking or shattering of the regrettably hardwood floors, cutting a steady, unbearably protracted toward the fucking stairs.
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When she finally pulls up to the staircase, she leans over and glances up, making sure there's nothing unpleasant waiting for them on the first landing. From what little she can see, the stairwell is clear. She moves past the entryway, planting herself between the hungries and Nick like a tiny sentinel, and motions to him from behind her back. He should take the lead, at least until they've left this specific threat behind them.
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Roughly three-quarters of the way from the top, Rush encounters their first problem.
Rather, the problem announces itself rather transparently in the form of a step whose foundations appear to be severely unstable, courtesy of the inexorable creep of rot eating steadily through the boards.
Fucking hardwood.
Rush shifts to the wall to brace himself against its support as he attempts to clear the unsteady area entirely with an overly long stride.
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She becomes aware that he's pausing a bit longer than usual a moment before one of the stairs creaks below his foot.
There's no time to look astonished or disapproving. Melanie glances at the doorway to see heads turning sharply in their direction. No time for sneaking anymore, either. She turns and legs it up the stairs with a frantic, hissed, "Go!"
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"Fuck," he hisses, brusque and tense, as he distantly hopes that his smaller charge has the requisite speed or agility to cross the gaps his passage has formed.
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Can they really outrun three of them?
"Keep going," Melanie says tersely. "Shout if there are more."
She spins on her heel, then leaps back down the stairs towards the frontrunner. Her bare feet curl over sharply defined hip bones, her hands grip its desiccated shoulders. Its teeth snap together once, a reaction to the impact but not to her, because she is nothing to them. It stumbles back, colliding with the others, already wavering uncertainly at the loss of stimuli. It won't last long, but it will buy Nick more time.
no subject
Particularly now that it has become increasingly evident that (a) as Melanie has claimed, the 'hungries' appear to be ignoring her utterly, (b) they are fair fucking fast, and (c) he will not need to worry about Melanie's physical capabilities in terms of her getting up the stairs.
That's a mild relief.
The organisms lurch blindly toward them in a disorganized surge, their bodies emaciated to the point of -
Rush realigns his focus to climbing the stairs in a relatively expeditious manner.
"Oh, fuck off," he snarls in profound disgust, rounding the next landing to discover a secondary cluster of the intolerable things moving in unerring synchrony toward the source of the chaos.
He swings the pipe from his shoulder to smash it into the approaching head of the first one with a sickening sound of metal impacting pulpy flesh.
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She takes in the scene farther up the stairs with a glance. More are closing in, but Nick's holding his own. She launches herself at one of the hungries in the back, scaling its body like an angry cat and sinking her teeth into the back of its neck. Her jaw works with automatic rapidity until its spine is severed and it collapses to the floor in an ungainly heap. Turning to the next, Melanie leaps, her mouth and chin smeared with grey and glistening red.
no subject
Rush spins neatly to curve the pipe's end into the head of one of the rapidly approaching monsters, clipping it at an angle that separates the lower half of its jaw from its skull. Undeterred, the thing continues to surge at him.
Wordless, Rush takes the legs out from beneath it with a well-executed arc from his weapon and slams the pipe's haft into the center of its chest.
The softened flesh caves immediately beneath the increase in pressure, and Rush looks away.
He looks to Melanie, who is apparently holding her own, and employing an atypical method of attack to do so.
He lifts the pipe to chest-level, regarding her warily, taking note of her tactic of severing bone and nerves via application of teeth, seemingly unaffected by whatever virulent strain or organism have mutated the formerly human host bodies beyond recognition.
Significantly atypical.
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"Are you hurt?" she asks quietly.
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What this may connote, he has no idea.
"Is this, perhaps, what you meant to specify by 'different'?" he says, the words edged and his diction sharp.
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Well. Any one of these bodies littering the floor could have been them. Except not really. Hers would be in England, and chances are nothing remains of either of them anymore.
She wipes at her face again, self-consciously. She must look like a mess. "I can control it. And I still have a mind." Both truths just sound like feeble excuses considering what she's done - what Nick watched her do.
"I'll leave you alone," she concludes, stepping over the bodies as she backs away from him.
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Her sense of self-control would be admirable, assuming she is openly resisting an instinctive drive to assert herself in a destructive and openly cannibalistic manner.
He has even less of an idea pertaining to how one should conduct oneself around a brand of composite child, roughly fifty percent of whose biology directly opposes his and encourages a potentially insatiable anthropophagitic urge.
"You're capable of exercising restraint," he says, the question implicit, his tone no less wary.
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Part of her does. But she doesn't have to listen to that part. It wasn't even roused by attacking the hungries, though that doesn't surprise her. It's not in the cordycep's interest for her, or any other hungry, to attack those already infected.
She could point out that she hasn't attacked Nick so far, but she's not entirely convinced he wouldn't be all right without her. Either way, she's not going to push her company on him. He might prefer it if she just left.
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Desire does not necessarily align with reality, but circumstantial evidence would indicate -
He has a fair idea of what it might indicate, and he would prefer not to examine it in any great length but suspects he may be forced to if this situation persists.
He watches her balance on a premeditated asymptote of her own making, her body language telegraphing her doubt and her irresolution.
Rush sighs.
He lowers the pipe in a deliberate downward arc, dropping it to his side.
"Obviously you've no plans to hurt me," he says tiredly.
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She drags her gaze up from the pipe to meet Nick's gaze. "If you want me to leave, I'll go."
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"You're certainly welcome to." He opens a hand in the opposite direction without looking at her. "In my experience, there is some credibility to the notion of safety in numbers."
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"Oh." She considers the implicit offer to stay. It's not even an offer, but a suggestion; he thinks they'll both be better off.
Well. She glances down the stairs - no more hungries will be coming from that direction, she'd guess - and then cautiously resumes climbing, edging past Nick to lead the way up the stairs.
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Rush watches a child, aged roughly somewhere between eight and ten, an unprecedented biological event, anomalous in every sense of the word, clearly capable of incredible amounts of self-discipline in extremis, climb a flight of stairs.
He follows her.
It is not often that he does not know what to say.
What does one say to a child who presumes herself a danger to those around her, save for the mindless masses that seek to exterminate and devour the mindful?
"You are very young," Rush remarks, inanely, like a man who does not know how to hold a conversation with eight-to-ten-year-old possibly-cannibalistic hybrid children.
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"And you were translocated to Manhattan shortly thereafter, I assume." Establishing a tenuous timeline of Melanie's life may not be the most practical use of their time, but it is Rush's understanding that conversation involves discussion of certain personal events, to some extent.
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It was easier back home - easier to let humanity go, because they only would have destroyed what little hope was left if she hadn't.
"ROMAC kept me safe for the first few months," she offers, since he seems curious. "But someone brought me out before they fell."
no subject
Their management had, in general, left much to be desired in all areas, until he had contributed to the immediate and inevitable engineering of their collapse into modern, Rift-adapted society.
Rush turns his mind from the subject.
He runs two fingers along the edge of the stair railing and notes the even distribution of dust.
Given the remaining organisms' difficulty with the stairs and the general deserted air pervading the building's upper levels, he is eighty percent confident that they there will be no further confrontations for the duration of their ascent.
Possibly closer to seventy-five percent.