Post-apocalyptic setting

[miltia]

Your character's world has ended and purgatory awaits them, a wasteland full of ruined buildings. The surrounding desert constantly wears down the buildings with a neverending wind. There aren't any monsters to worry about, no zombies or demons, but your characters are haunted by the ghosts of people they once knew and there's only one escape from

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[mizuhomaiden]

They'd failed. No, she'd failed. Origin's pact failing had been because of her. After Zelos had betrayed them and then that battle, she'd lost something. It was bad enough that she'd had that weird dream about being in some mental institute while she'd been traveling with the Renegades to deal with the Tree, but to let a dream affect her so much?

Sheena had failed and the world - both worlds - had died with her failure.

Standing on the top of the tallest of the ruined buildings, the ninja looked down at the place she was now in. She could hear voices, whispers at the moment, in the back of her mind. They weren't her pacts; they'd all left her, retreated to wherever Great Spirits would go when released from whatever bound them (if even they had survived).

Whispers, whispers...

[forhissister]

His dream had been shattered, and all because of them. Lloyd and his friends had demolished Mithos' plan to revive his sister, and now even Sylvarant and Tethe'alla had paid the price. They should have known better than to mess with things that they couldn't hope to comprehend.

But that didn't mean Mithos would go through this afterlife on his own. Not at all. He could hear Martel's voice, telling him that he had had it all wrong from the start, but her whispers only served to further plunge the boy into a despair over the loss of everything he'd cultivated over 4000 years. He was with his sister, but he couldn't see her, couldn't hug her, couldn't go places with her and see the world's beauty. There wasn't any in this place.

He still wasn't alone, though; they had helped to create this place, and so Mithos would get revenge for not being able to see his dreams realized. He had followed Sheena up to the top of the building, and now crept up behind her. "You think this is what happened to Mizuho?" he asked, a sarcastic edge to his

[mizuhomaiden]

Sheena did not turn around when one of the whispers (was it really a whisper?) turned into a recognizable voice. Her eyes narrowed a fraction as the wind whipped around her and the four thousand year-old child behind her.

"No," she replied, her voice barely heard above the wind. "Mizuho would not linger like this. There would be nothing where my village once was - not a stone, not a plant, not a soul."

Crossing her arms before her, she tilted her head down, as if she was contemplating turning. Yet, she still did not move, kept her eyes on the deteriorating landscape below. "If you are here to relish in your victory, get it over with. If not, give me a good reason not to beat you like your mother should have."

[forhissister]

She called it a victory!? Mithos wanted to laugh, and he wanted to scream. Martel was here, but it wasn't quite Martel. Where was his sister, where was their happiness, if he'd won? He would make certain Sheena regretted what she'd done...and regretted not turning around. He began gathering his body's mana, concentrating it into his open palm.

"Fine, I will," he replied simply. "You razed everything to the ground, and now look at where it landed you. You've still got to live knowing you got the population of two worlds killed. But there's still something you took from me. I want it back! I want my sister back!" he shouted. There was so much more he wanted to say, but he was getting tired of giving speeches that justified things. This slight was far and above what had been done before, and there was only one way to pay it back. The magic ignited in his hand, turning into a ball of fire that he hurled toward the ninja.

[thatdamnedninja]

The worst thing about this whole 'wow, the world sorta died all over the place and we're unlucky enough to have survived' deal wasn't the ghosts that dogged their heels. It wasn't the memories of pain and failure and horror and disappointment and sick-to-the-stomach terror. It wasn't even that she'd been stuck with two Turks.

No, those weren't the worst things. Not by a long shot. Not right now. Actually, they could be pretty cool--the Turks, that was, not the memories or the goddamn ghosts--when they wanted to be; after months of wandering around together for survival, it wasn't just one big fat case of 'get along or die', either. If Yuffie was honest, she'd admit that she'd never really hated the Turks anyway. They'd done some pretty horrible stuff, sure, but they weren't the only ones. As far as she could tell, Reno and Elena at least had never kicked kittens for fun.

Yuffie kicked a rock, arms folded petulantly across a chest that was probably going to start growing inward if it got any smaller. "I don't want to resort to

[rookieism]

"We'll eat Reno first," Elena called, pointedly not looking at the faces staring back at her from the cracked compact she'd found a couple of weeks ago. Tseng again, and her parents. At first, she'd thought that only she could see them, that she'd gone crazy in the trauma of the world ending. It had been...oddly comforting to hear that she wasn't the only one seeing ghosts.

She finished finger-combing her hair (and it was so weird that she still clung to social niceties without a society) and snapped the compact shut. "He's the tallest."

[offduty]

The lack of sex and booze was what sucked the most. Cigarettes, too. These were not vices Reno needed, but when the whole goddamn world was crumbling to shit around you and your dead partner kept popping in and out at random times (including when he was trying to take a piss because apparently, Rude was a perverted sonofabitch even when dead), it just would've been nice to have some things to, y'know. Relax to. Or completely drown out reality, as it were, but whatever.

"Oh, so now that I'm food, you're not callin' me anorexic anymore?" He reached back, redid his ponytail to keep the hair tie from slipping. "We'll eat the other people first. Who says we gotta eat among our own?"

He glanced to his left and Rude pushed up his sunglasses.

Freaking ghosts.

[thatdamnedninja]

"I'm not eating Reno," was the immediate protest. "He tastes gross." Pause, backtrack. "Not that I'd know that, I mean, I'm just guessing. Ew. I won't eat you, either, Elena; your hair goes duck-butt in the morning and obviously that means you're unfit for human consumption." God, she was so tired. Her stomach felt like it was eating itself, or like it'd crawl up and out to devour whatever it fell on first.

Yuffie hunted around with her foot, found another rock. Kicked it so hard that it knocked down the dilapidated remains of a wall, about ten paces away. They'd been out for hours, hunting for another place to sleep since the last one had sorta collapsed all over them. Story of their lives, these days; everything destroyed, one thing crumbling after another. Food was still around but finding something good was almost impossible, and Reno wouldn't be gourmet to anybody except a really, really desperate hooker.

She was an optimist, though. Sort of. She wasn't dead, that was for sure, which was always a plus. She also wasn't totally

[allroadslead]

There were two beds (mattresses) in the rundown, used-to-be...apartment. He thought it was an apartment; it looked like one, but it was kinda hard to tell these days and Sam didn't have the inclination to bother thinking about it too much anymore. Dean wasn't sleeping in the one next to his, though. Even in the near pitch-black darkness, he could see a faint shadow a few feet away.

It'd weirded him out the first few times he'd woken to Dean standing by the entrance like that, but he'd gotten used to it. There were worst things he hadn't gotten used to yet, like seeing Jess pinned to the ceiling every time he opened his eyes. Half the time, he wasn't sure if Dean wasn't just some spectral image, too. But Jess never spoke and Dean did. That, and Dean wasn't right. Everything about this was wrong, and Sam figured that had to mean it was real

[theroadsofar]

Dean didn't need to sleep anymore. Not after the experiments, when he'd been somehow dragged back to his own corpse and they'd run those tests, somehow taken his damned soul and made him a little personal Hell on earth.

It was like being paralyzed, trapped within his own body, feeling his blood spilling from still fresh wounds. Felt it stop. Felt his body start to stiffen on him. Dean should be dead, after being torn apart like that when his time ran out...only he couldn't even remember his last couple of hours (days?), only suddenly looking up at a blinding light, hearing voices. Human voices? Demons, come to get a piece of Dean Winchester since he was the only game in town now that Dad booked it? All he knew was they cut into him when he was already dead, kept going and the next day, they'd start over, and over, and Dean would've screamed if he could just control his body. It should've been impossible, but every night, when they left him strapped to that table, shut off the lights on him, Dean clung to anything to keep him focused

[theroadsofar]

Now he turned to watch Sammy. For a second, his eyes were pitch black before they vanished, like an unholy second set of eyelids, his own dead body's eyes focused on his little brother

[allroadslead]

"Yeah, I'll bet." Not enough energy to come up with anything more intelligent than that.

Sam reached for the flimsy plastic water bottle (half full, but better than nothing) inside the duffel. One of those disposal ones that everyone always ran out to buy cases upon cases of when any news of the world ending filtered out, except he didn't think there was any news this time. Not for them, anyway. One day he just woke up, stuck in the same old institute, with Ruby instead of Dean; Dean was gone by then and Sam hadn't expected him to be back, hadn't really wanted it, anyway. Every time Dean came back from the dead, it was like the world was asking, here, let's see how long you can keep him alive this timeSo Dean wasn't there and he woke up and everything was falling down. And that was it. Then there was this, a broken world populated with ninety percent corpses, ten percent ragtag survivors. If you could call them that. Might as well be ghosts, same as the ones following everyone. He didn't know what they were; they didn't hurt anyone

[lady_general]

It was getting harder to wake up in what passed as a morning. The hazy color of the sky and the near constant roar of wind through buildings was more than enough to wear away at the mind of the person left behind. Especially when paired with the ghosts.

Today, it was Cid that watched her, looming and silent in the yellow science coat he insisted upon wearing. Sometimes it was Locke, sometimes it was Leo, but there was always someone waiting for Celes upon her awakening. She'd gotten used to it, wondered if she was going mad.

Certainly, possibly, perhaps it was the effect of her genetic engineering. With a groan, Celes wrapped her cloak around her and looked at her sword. It had served her well, but was starting to show its age.

[clockmongler]

Falling great heights would be the death of a human. As a Nobody, however, it only meant that, ten feet from an untimely and broken demise on the sands below, one of those summoned cards was quickly enlarged and placed beneath him like some sort of magic carpet. He glided smoothly to the ground, no more worse for wear than before, but at least he was away from that imbecile machine who insisted on annoying him.

It seemed even here he was not alone, however. X kept to whatever shadows there were, peering at the woman curiously. Hm...

[lady_general]

Celes rolled her shoulders and sheathed her sword. What was there to do, aside for look for other survivors, and have a real conversation for once? It would do her well not to mutter to herself like some crazy woman, and thinking to herself was beginning to get old.

Worse yet, there were no monsters to kill, she'd instead cut down attackers, wildmen. Celes pulled her hood over her head and began to walk, casting the spells of protection she would need for the next little while. It felt as if she were being watched.

[rope_victim]

If dreaming of her dead brother had been bad, then being shipped to an institute for nights of unending horror was worse, then waking up to days and nights of constant ghosts was sheer, unadulterated hell. It was hard for Miku to wake up some days, she felt the ghosts weighing down on her like sheets of lead. But, up she got and out she went. Her skin was red with curse marks of one make or another, and she moved slowly. There was nothing physical to hurt her anymore, just...

...just the dead. The dead always hurt worse, without question. They were hungry for her warmth, for her soul's blue light. In the beginning, she could outrun them, but now, now she felt so slow.

Miku rounded the corner just as slowly as ever and came face to face with a tall woman. She screamed.

[rope_victim]

Miku held her cheek and whimpered. As if the cursemarks on her face weren't painful enough, the woman had struck her. There were ghosts around her, and though they looked benevolent at the moment, Miku wasn't sure when they would shift.

"You would scream too, if you only saw the dead," she murmured softly, trying to will the pain away from her cheek. Her shoulders sagged.