We Are Awakened With The Axe [Open to All]

[applesaucemod]

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. They're probably living on a nice farm somewhere.

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.]

Comments

[lottawork]

"I'm fine." The pipe hovers indecisively until he lowers it, his expression locked. The level of control demonstrated for the duration of the incursion would indicate that she is - dissimilar.

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.

[all_the_gifts]

"Half-hungry," she explains, dropping her gaze. "My parents..."

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.

[lottawork]

Some sort of physiological hybrid, by her own admission. Rush retreats to evaluate her, eyes narrowed.

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.

[all_the_gifts]

Melanie pauses mid-exit, eyeing him uncertainly. "Yes. I... I don't want to hurt people."

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.

[lottawork]

One way or another, he will have to initiate some decisive action, as he is loathe to do so in front of a child but is distressingly lacking in alternatives.

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.

[all_the_gifts]

"No." Melanie watches the pipe drop, and her own stance relaxes a little in response. She doesn't move closer, though. Nick knows what she is, now, and the time she spent with Parks and the others has taught her better.

She drags her gaze up from the pipe to meet Nick's gaze. "If you want me to leave, I'll go."

[lottawork]

"What the fuck would that accomplish," he snaps with roughly twenty percent of his typical rancor, the weariness of prolonged physical activity beginning to seep into the slope of his shoulders. His free hand curls around the back of his neck as he looks up the remainder of the stairs.

"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."

[all_the_gifts]

She'd thought it might make him feel safer, but it seems knowing what she is hasn't completely soured him. If she wasn't already certain he wasn't from her universe, that would cement it.

"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.

[lottawork]

The wind outside whips past the building exterior, gliding over the contours of the paneled wood and stone, dislodging the shattered fragments of glass still clustered along windowsills.

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.

[all_the_gifts]

Melanie glances back at him, surprised by the non-sequitur. "Yes." Her steps slow as she considers how better to respond, but it's hard to guess what he's really asking, if anything. "I don't know how old, exactly. The Breakdown was twenty years ago, but Dr. Caldwell guessed I must have been born in the last ten."

[lottawork]

"You experienced something similar to - this, then." He gestures vaguely in the general direction of the cityscape outside, indicating the perpetual state of architectural and cultural and societal deterioration in which the city seems to exist.

"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.

[all_the_gifts]

"Something like this," she agrees, a bit vaguely. It was different in her universe. There were only two kinds of hungry, and she understood how things worked, and the only human she had to worry about protecting was Miss Justineau. Here, she feels as if she has to protect everyone, because this isn't the way things are supposed to be for them.

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."

[lottawork]

"Good," he snorts, with somewhat more emphasis than is perhaps requisite given the subject in question. "ROMAC's protection management was shoddy at best."

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.