Night 51: Recreational Field
[From here.]
When Locke opened the door, he was greeted by a rush of fresh air-something entirely unexpected, on his part. It was too easy, wasn't it? When he looked around, all he saw was a field, a shed, and walls that blocked him from being home free. Lucky me, he thought to himself, as he looked around the surroundings. So far, he'd managed to ( Read more... )
When Locke opened the door, he was greeted by a rush of fresh air-something entirely unexpected, on his part. It was too easy, wasn't it? When he looked around, all he saw was a field, a shed, and walls that blocked him from being home free. Lucky me, he thought to himself, as he looked around the surroundings. So far, he'd managed to ( Read more... )
Suddenly the atmosphere changed. It wasn't so dark (though it was still dark), and the air was clearer. Recognizable. Celty's half-run held up as she turned her eyes upwards. Outside, the sky. That had been a door out! She turned to look back at the building to see if she could recognize it. It wasn't so large as any hospital she'd seen from the outside before, but then again, she'd only seen the hospital in Ikebukuro. Which... wasn't here. Looking from side to side, then back to the little fielded area proved that much. This wasn't Ikebukuro. No buildings bunched together or lights flashing in what was clearly the nighttime. This couldn't be that city or any city!
So where was she?!
The Dullahan continued to look around, searching for clues or anything that would help her sort this mess out when she finally caught sight of a figure, person-shaped and close! Finally, she'd found someone! She nearly called out by some forgotten reflex, mouth opening to do so before she caught herself just shy of any sound.
No, I can't. Not until I know what's going on! she told herself as she flipped open the notebook. Though it was dark, and she hadn't ever needed to write before, Celty did her absolute best to scrawl out letters onto the page so that they could be read. She ended up scribbling out attempt left and right, and eventually turned over a new page to start all over again, spacing letters far apart so she wouldn't mess up. What she wouldn't have given to have her PDA back!
When she thought they were halfway decent, she took the time to cap the pen before rushing to the person (she hadn't been making him up) and holding up the notebook face out for him to hopefully read.
C A N / O U T F L L N E W I E R E i A M ?
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Nor the notebook that Celty held out to the patient she hoped would come to her aid. At first glance, anyway.
On second inspection, however, Depth Charge might notice (or perhaps not, with his flashlight dead) that the lines that she had scrawled into place were moving, squiggling over the page as if they had come to life. Slowly, they shifted out of legibility and danced over the page, curling into symbols of no language in particular and then --
Slowly, but surely --
The formed the shape of an eye, simple in shape and messily delineated as if drawn by a child, but undeniably gazing at Depth Charge.
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Click.
Immediately, Depth Charge sprang to the defensive, crowbar swung back up and clenched in both hands, letting his flashlight drop to the grass with a clumsy thunk. Nothing in his line of sight (slag it, where are those motion sensors when you need them!?)- but the sound had seemed to come from behind him, back towards the entrance.
Knuckles whitening across the ridge of his crowbar, heels planted firmly into the ground, he turned back around and- young woman, dressed in the uniform. Citizen.
The Maximal let out a deep sigh of irritation (twinged, admittedly, with just a little embarrassment), lowering the crowbar again. "Primus, lady, watch it. You nearly gave me a- notebook?" He blinked. That thing in his face? Definitely a notebook. Even if he couldn't make head or tails of whatever it was she'd written on it. C-A-N...? Can what? "Look, I don't have time for this," he said, shaking his head. "Go play hangbot with someone el..."
Only, suddenly, that didn't look like hangbot. And last time he'd checked, ink didn't move. Automatically Depth Charge's expression flashed back onto suspicious, leaning in to look from straight back into the new spider-lines of an eye as they arranged themselves on the paper, then back to the woman with a frown. "What the Pit are you...?"
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If she hadn't had her head for unknown reasons this wouldn't have happened!
She frowned hopefully as he looked, wanting him to be able to answer things for her, but he didn't seem to like that she'd tried to talk to him like this. Again, she couldn't blame him, but she wasn't playing by any means! And she didn't have the slightest idea what 'hangbot' was!
A hand waved, then clapped together with the other as though Celty was praying, or pleading, which she was, for him to not brush her off. This was the first person she'd seen, and no matter what kind of weird things he was saying, he had to know where this was and could tell her!
But now he was frowning right back at her. No! Raising an index finger after her attempt at begging him to stay, she drew the notebook back in to try something simple, but no sooner than she'd turned the page back she was dropping it like fire. Her hands withdrew in shock and a faint "Eep!" escaped her lips without any thought. What was that? What was that?! It looked like an eye and not a thing like she'd written! She shivered, then shook her head violently towards the man and waved her hands in front of her. She hadn't done it! She didn't know how it had been done, but she definitely wasn't the one responsible!
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Hair, dark and harshly delineated as if gouged into the paper, covered the face of what appeared to be a woman, obscuring her features until only that eye peered out. Feet peered into view, and red ink that was barely differentiable from the rest of it shaded over them, up the edge of her dress, crawled up to her neck and vanished into her hair, still growing until it reached the edge of the page --
And then it extended beyond, tendrils of it licking out towards their feet.
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Feeling his pulse begin to rise, he dropped his eyes to the ground where the notebook had landed open, and still the lines moved. In the dark he could just about see it: the eye (a chill recognition ran through him, but why...?) became a face, then the face grew a scribbled neck, shoulders, body... and suddenly, the energon-chip dropped. No, screw that, the entire bank of Cybertron dropped, because that recognition thing suddenly made a horrific amount of sense. "Oh, Primus. You have got to be kidding me..."
But if this was a joke, he was Miss Cybertropolis 3118. He could see it now, curling out from the edges of the page in long, dark threads. Hair.
Just perfect.
Depth Charge's first thought sprang straight to the woman standing opposite him. "Stay back!" he barked, throwing out a warning arm just in case she was deaf as well as mute (and that would be his luck), taking several staggering steps backwards himself. Slag, slag, slag! "She could attack at any second!"
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Celty hesitated to look but did when she thought that maybe she'd been seeing things when she released it. The eye was gone, so she hadn't been seeing things, or so she thought for all of a second. Then she saw stranger things on the page. Movement. The kind that really shouldn't have come from anything, notebook page or otherwise. And it only got worse when what looked like tentacles to her began whipping out from the page. Celty backed away, afraid at first, but then remembered. The Saika blade had had some pretty strange powers, and given what Celty herself could do, shadowy tentacles weren't all that unfamiliar.
Though she still didn't like it.
Hearing the man's warning, Celty brought her hands up and tried to form her scythe. If someone was going to attack, she'd need it! So she tried, and tried, and... after a third time of clenching her hands around what should have been a forming reaping scythe, Celty still grasped only air. Huh? she looked down at her hands to finally notice what was missing other than her scythe. It hadn't been visible in the dark and since it had always been so second nature, Celty hadn't stopped to see that the dark mist that usually poured from her body wasn't there. Not even a small wisp of it!
What was she supposed to do without her weapon!?
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Hair continued to pour out of the paper, increasing in volume until the notebook was entirely subsumed within dark masses of it, strands tangling their way through the grass in search of something living. Distantly, a faint rattling sound started, echoing around the field in a way that made it impossible to discern the precise source it -- but growing in loudness with each passing breath.
And suddenly -- in the centre, where the drawing had been -- a set of ruined fingertips jerked into visibility, scrabbling outwards to seek purchase on the ground. Hair writhed around it when it did, bloodied nails ripping into the turf. Muscles flexed and an arm appeared as if yanked out, dirt-covered.
Under the dirt was skin blue-pale, blood mixing indistinguishable from the clinging soil.
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The fact that the woman didn't look nearly so surprised as she should have done at the fact that her notbook was exploding hair, or that she kept doing that weird clenching thing with her hands barely seemed to matter at this point. When the Scarecrow's hallway witch turned up, you kind of didn't really get time to think about that sort of thing. What it did tell him though was that he was probably out playing the field with a newbie, and that- that wasn't good news, unless the skinny little blonde could somehow fight like a demon. Hime mk. II? Yeah, right.
But Depth Charge wasn't given much longer to count his lack of blessings, and the set of points emerging from the mass of hair and darkness he could no longer recognise as a notebook were fingers, and following that-- oh, this was the witch, alright, he'd have recognised that sick, blued skin anywhere. And judging from the way it was hauling itself out of the pages, it wasn't going to be long before limited reach didn't matter anymore.
"What are you doing?!" he hised across at the woman, shooting her a look of frustration. His first instinct was to beat a hasty retreat before any more of that thing could get out, but like Pit he was about to leave a newbie behind. She couldn't even talk, for pity's sake. But with that thing putting more and more distance between them with each step he could out of its grasp- "Move! This thing isn't about to wait around for whatever magical power you've got to blow slag up for you or something, get it?"
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Though she could understand why he was.
Celty backed away even more when she saw that the tentacles were actually someone's hair, and that that someone was coming out of the notebook! Someone with blue skin! A movie! It was like one of those movies! Not with the aliens, but the horror, "hide behind the couch" kind that Shinra watched late at night sometimes.
Maybe she really was dreaming all of this.
A quick check - more pinching, this time of her face - didn't work, and the pain got her to move. So did the man's voice since he was apparently shouting at her. Move? Move where?! Celty looked around. There was the building on one side and an open field on the other. She may not have watched a lot of horror movies, but she knew that it was better to be in than out, hidden and not in the open. Inside then. She could see there was a door behind the man, and though it was closer, decided it better to go back to the one she'd come from. No creepy horror film monsters between her and that one.
She turned to go but paused in the retreat to give the man a look. Would he be all right if she just left like he said?
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The head lolled loosely, unnaturally, until one wide eye was revealed -- and then another heave and the other arm was free, nails clawing into the dirt as the body jerked itself free.
As Celty turned to run, the figure amidst the hair freed itself enough to lurch forward with a guttural croak, pale extended to grab her ankle with a speed that blurred her features.
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But then, what the slag was he doing thinking about the future when that witch was still clawing out at them? Hand arm, then he must have blinked because suddenly there was that pale, grimy face rolling back as though it were on a doll's head and staring emptily up at them.
It was the hands that got the woman. When he finally freed his eyes again she was already turning, back towards the door- only to pause at the last second. Just in time for the witch to make her move.
Movement just below his line of sight. What the thing was doing only registered when he saw its hands splay and reach, and then he jerked into life almost instantly. Crow bar swung high, he only had a split second to call out a, "Look out!" before he brought it down onto the hands as hard as he could.
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It slammed behind her, but after a short pause she found herself worried again and chanced a look, pulling the door just enough to look back from inside the hall. That guy would be all right... right?
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And Kayako burst forth from the same place her hands had appeared, both hands outstretched and seeking Depth Charge's neck. Her hair rose from the ground at the same time, writhing around his legs and torso with a rapidity that would be near impossible to avoid.
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Up ahead, a door slammed. "Nice," he murmured, straightening up. "Real courte--" Then white flashed in front of his eyes and his nerve endings sang out as something wrapped around his neck, something else around his legs, waist, and suddenly he was choking his own words into a wheeze. Careless! Too slagging careless! His knuckles whitened as his grip tightened around his crowbar momentarily- and then the metal bar fell back into the sea of hair as his hands shot to his throat, tugging and scrabbling at the dead white-blue skin he couldn't see but knew was there, clutching him tight.
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A deep breath and some determination could do a Dullahan wonders. Celty pushed the door open when she saw the man was in trouble and had herself rushing for the mess of hair. Whatever the girl was, Celty was a Dullahan! She didn't stay injured, so no matter what kind of bizzare things the girl could do, Celty felt confident that she could survive them a lot better than the man. When she was close enough, she dove at the girl, arms out to tackle her and hopefully take her off and away from the other.
What she'd do after that was still being thought of.
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