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]

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.