[log] SUTEKI NA AFTERNOON, FURACHI NA MIDNIGHT YEAH [closed]

[spoileralert]

Characters: Stephanie Brown, Mami Tomoe, Al Elric, Ed Elric, Freya Crescent
Location C10, building 49
Date: Day 26, evening
Summary: Thundersnow shenanigans
Warnings: will be in subject lines

If your character is hallucinating, please create a top-level comment describing their behavior.
OPTIONAL: Tag hallucinating characters with characters that are also hallucinating for maximum clusterfuck!

Comments

[spoileralert]

Stephanie had drifted off into a feverish sleep when a soft voice woke her up. Steph, it called teasingly, Steeeeeph, wake up! Mom bought donuts.

She groaned and rolled over, one eye cracking open at the mention of food. It took a long time for her blurry vision to clear, but she knew that voice.

"Becky?" That's right, it was Becky, her best friend. They were having a sleepover - must have been, for Steph to be asleep.

Come on sleepy head, they're fresh.

She yawned, and finally opened both eyes wide enough to see the figure looming over her.

It was her father, wearing blue and orange and a kerchief over his face, gun pointed directly at her.

You were always a disappointment, Stephanie.

She sits up with a gasp, ready (if not willing) to fight for her life.

[fataliteas]

She's standing over Stephanie, her breathing tight and afraid, unarmed (for the moment) save for how both hands have curled into fists. She doesn't see the older girl she's been traveling with.....not quite. The image of another creature has been overlaid, so vivid that she could almost swear that it's what real and the flickering glimpses of Stephanie is the hallucination.

Still, the lingering confusion makes her hesitate. Right up until Stephanie moves oh so suddenly.

Some part of her knows that she ought to run. Ordinary humans can't do anything against a familiar, let alone a full-fledged Witch. But a larger, stronger, louder part screams that running won't save her, it's too late for her to be saved. It shrieks frantically that she should fight, kill, destroy the threat. Even if it's futile. Even if she will doom herself by trying. She doesn't deserve to live anyway, so what does it matter?

When Stephanie jolts upright, Mami swings a fist at what she believes to be her enemy's face.

[spoileralert]

Steph's head is what moves first, before she even hears the gunshot. She twists and falls, from a propped upright position into one from which she can give a high heel kick at her father's belt. She knows that there's a smoke bomb there, in the shape of those stupid little pellets that cover his chest.

"No," she tells him furiously, turning again so that she can stumble to her feet. She won't die today.

[fataliteas]

The familiar is fast, squealing at her in its alien tongue, but that's no surprise. They're living curses that aren't bound by human limitations. What Mami believes to be the familiar's scissors (actually Stephanie's heel) plunges into her upper shoulder and sends her skidding backward.

In her mind, she feels the sting of a blade wound instead of a deep bruise. A hand placed instinctively over the point of impact comes away wet with imaginary blood. She can smell it, feel it seeping out, see it stain her clothes. And she knows that she can't let the familiar gain the advantage of height.

She flings herself forward in a tackle.

[armoured]

Alphonse hears the noise from the other side of the room, but everything seems to be getting fuzzy and strange. He gets to his feet and sways, before staggering towards her slowly.

"St...eph?"

No. No, that isn't Steph. For a moment, he isn't even truly sure who Steph is, because the sight in front of him is driving all other thoughts out of his head. The broken and charred body of the thing he and Ed had brought back is staring at him. Bones crack audibly as it tries to get towards him, spilling blood all over the floor.

Why couldn't you save me...

Al freezes. And then he screams.

[spoileralert]

It takes Steph a moment to realize that she's the one screaming (both of them now, in a sort of unholy chorus) as her eyes are drawn away from the gun in her father's hand and towards the blade sliding back out of his chest. It's the worst kind of betrayal - all of the hurt of his trying to kill her is overwhelmed by a daughters instinct, and she sobs.

"Daddy!"

He falls to the ground (where she loses sight of his body, though she doesn't register this as a concern) and the psychopath in an owl suit is left standing in his place.

"I'll kill you," she screams, stumbling to her feet while tears stream down her face, "I'll kill you!"

[armoured]

Kill...

The word makes it somehow through the miasma of pain that seems to be surrounding Al in a thick soup. He doesn't know where it came from, but he wouldn't be surprised if it came from the monstrosity at his feet.

This... this isn't his mother. This thing, it's...

"S-Stop! Stop it, I'm sorry... I'm so sorry... please--!"

He puts his hands out as it seems to rise up towards him, but not to fend it off, just in supplication and apology.

cw: minor self-harm

[fataliteas]

Earlier, Mami had felt okay. Not great, but okay, for the first time in a long while. The leftover crafts found inside the house, while nothing impressive, managed to get her mind off of the bleak reality that was the group's day-to-day. She had been able to sit down and sort through what had been left behind without intrusive thoughts about survival or her personal failures crowding in to eat away at her spirits and darken her mood.

Then the blizzard came to seal them inside. Cabin fever set in, and Mami succumbed by inches.

For her, it began with minor distortions. Hearing voices and seeing faces that didn't really exist.....glimpses of angered or despairing expressions, snatches of broken sobs and harsh accusations, each one belonging to a person she believes she had killed. Vivid enough to make Mami noticeably falter at odd moments (going silent mid-conversation, looking away to stare overlong into empty space) but not break down. Just a growing strain that made her head ache and her mouth dry up, something she passed off as sour daydreams brought on from stress and poor sleep.

Then it got worse. The hallucinations changed, turned monstrous. She began to see Witches and their familiars instead of furniture, the others in her group, dead air. Her surroundings morphed into the inside of a magical barrier, glowing and shifting, pulsing like a sick heartbeat. Sometimes only for an instant, sometimes for longer. Erratic, insane, frightening. That's when she started keeping her knife in her sleeve or otherwise always close at hand, her body language and overall demeanor becoming more unstable as her control began to fray.

By nightfall, Mami has taken her knife to the walls of the place in the house that she's claimed for herself. Fully in the grip of a hallucinatory trance, she carves strange sigils again and again, only to stab them furiously with the blade tip upon finishing the intricate symbol. She hisses names that no one else knows. Tears roll down her face unheeded. One hand claws absently at her throat, leaving deep scratches.

[lancingintherain]

There's not many places to hide alone for long in a one-story house with five people in it, especially when every one of those five is succumbing to hallucinations and paranoia. Freya's fought a losing battle all day against her own worsening madness, and one of the few clear thoughts left in her head is that she needs to get as far away from the others as possible. She's not sure whether they're friends or enemies anymore, and she doesn't trust her self-control or her own perceptions.

When she ducks into the room Mami's in, she's still overwhelmed by the smell of blood and the sounds of battle, but when she takes in the sigils carved on the wall and the sight of Mami clawing at her throat, her shock at the other girl's state is enough to pull her briefly out of her own.

"Stop! Stop it!"

She can't remember her name, and that frightens her, but she knows she recognizes her—for a moment, she remembers that this girl is a friend, and that's enough to make her go to her side and reach out for her hands, to pull them away before she does any more damage.

[fataliteas]

Freya's voice is not meaningless sound. Distorted by the influence of Mami's cabin fever, it is something far worse: clownish laughter, eerie and inhuman. The sound of sudden, grinning death.

Mami whirls around, eyes widening with fear.

"You—!!"

Then hatred takes over, hatred and despair and still more terror, the madness of a cornered animal with no other options left but to fight. The knife in her hand swings. Clumsy, yet full of killing intent.

WOW I NEED MORE FREAKED OUT ICONS

[lancingintherain]

When Mami turns with that knife in her hand, suddenly she's not a girl anymore, but a soldier: taller, and not holding a knife, but a sword. Freya pulls her hands back and gasps, dodging the swing reflexively even as she struggles to get a conscious grip on what's happening.

That swing is all wrong for a sword—the wrong speed, the wrong posture, and that's what makes the illusion wobble again. She makes a fast, but graceless attempt to seize her attacker's arm—whoever they really are—to keep them from swinging that knife at her again.

[armoured]

The sigils are what Al notices first.

The second one, especially, seems familiar to him. The patterns writhe and twist on the wall until they reform into a human transmutation circle. He doesn't recognise the girl drawing them, not at the moment, but he knows deep in his soul that things are about to go horribly wrong.

"STOP!"

His voice is cracked and desperate, a despairing plea to someone that he isn't even sure can hear him. He rushes forwards and tries to grab her hand, tries to impossibly smear the carvings with his other.

[fataliteas]

She writhes in his grip, awkwardly tearing the knife away from the wall to bring it down upon the point of contact.

What she feels isn't a cold metal hand, but a slithery, leafy tendril curling around her wrist. Next it will wrap around her arm, then her waist, then her legs.....and then hurl her into the nearest wall hard enough to break her back.

That's what she knows will happen, because the figure filling her mind's eye is not Alphonse Elric. It's Gertrud the Witch, a massive flower-plant monstrosity intent on consuming her alive.

[armoured]

Lucky for him, the blade scores off the broad metal of his arm, leaving a deep scratch and filling the air with the ugly sound of metal scraping on metal. Not that he even notices what she's doing, as he's too intent on the symbols on the wall.

"Stop-- you have to, this-- I can't..."

His mumbles are feverish, and his grip tightens on Mami just out of instinct. Something terrible is going to happen if he can't erase this transmutation circle, something-- something he never wants to see again.

[lancingintherain]

Her years of traveling alone, and pitching a tent in the middle of some wilderness just as often as paying for a bed in town, have made her a very light sleeper. The thunder wakes her as it carries into the hours before dawn; at first, she thinks she’s only woken from a dream, but then that distant, unmistakable sound comes again and she lies still, listening. She feels strange. Wide awake, but somehow detached, she feels the thunder pulling her right out of this world and back into vivid memories of her own.

To ground herself, she tries to pull her thoughts back to present, real things: the chilled air, the stiff weight of her ragged blanket, the dull ache in her empty stomach, the dusty smell of the floor, the other smells and soft sounds of the house. But after it all, she still thinks of rain.

She uncurls and sits up, knowing she’s not going to fall back asleep. Pulling her blanket around her shoulders, she listens for anybody else stirring, and whispers carefully into the darkness:

“Anyone else awake? Anyone else hear that?”

[spoileralert]

Stephanie has slept poorly since she stopped sleeping on a bed. Perhaps it's a sign that she's spoiled, but she just never got used to hard floors and ventilation shafts as beds. The thunder brings her close enough to wakefulness that the ever-present ache in her back wakes her the rest of the way up. She's almost back asleep again when she hears Freya's whisper.

"What?" she whispers back, still not quite awake enough to have absorbed the question.

[lancingintherain]

Inwardly, she's surprised and embarrassed by the way Stephanie's voice startles her—she hadn't realized she was so tense. One ear turns towards Steph involuntarily, then Freya turns her head a moment later to look at her properly. Her eyes have adjusted to the dark as much as they're going to, and she can make the other girl out well enough.

"That sound. The thunder... can you hear it?"

Of course, it's just her luck that total silence from outside follows her words. She knows she isn't imagining things, and waits for the sound to come again and back her up.

[spoileralert]

"Is that what it was?" She's sleep addled and feels strange, and can't quite place the shadows around the room or the sounds coming from the other sleepers. It's a very disorienting feeling, so much so that she isn't oriented enough to respond to it properly.

"Yeah, I heard it."

[armoured]

Al has got used to seeing Freya and not associate her with his own demons, but something seems to be subtly different tonight. He is awake when she calls, not that he is surprised to be. Even though he has to sleep now, somehow, he tries to fight it off as long as possible each night. This isn't the sleep that he's missed, this is dreamless darkness and it reminds him of his body rejecting his soul.

He turns his head to look at her, his eyes bright pinpricks of light in the darkness. For just a second in the gloom, she transforms into something else. Something bowed under the weight of pain and sorrow, something that used to be smiling and full of life.

"Ni--"

The half name escapes him as a gasp before he forces himself to reality again, though it feels difficult.

"...yeah, I heard it. Do you think there's a storm coming?"

[lancingintherain]

Those glowing eyes in his dark face trigger memories of battle and fire and cruel voices, and her hand itches to reach for a spear she doesn't have; but an instant later, she recognizes that those eyes belong to Al, her friend, and not to one of those mindless creatures. She closes her hand around the edge of her blanket instead, and hopes that he didn't see her flinch.

And there's that name again: "Nina". Who is this Nina person? She sets that thought aside and just tries to breathe easily, to bring her heart rate back to normal. One ear turns towards the wall as she listens for another peal of thunder.

"Perhaps. ...It might be nice. Some rain would melt some of this snow."

She twitches her nose, and sighs.

"I can't smell any rain, though. It's too damn cold—I can't smell anything."

so late to this game.

[forfeits]

"Yeah, I hear it."

The rumbling of thunder is not something they've heard here before and that makes him more nervous than it should. Anything unexpected in a place like this has to be treated with caution, after all.

He sits up from his sleeping spot, listening carefully, hyper-aware of his surroundings.

"Must mean there's a storm coming. Which means more snow." As if they weren't having enough trouble traveling without it.

never

[lancingintherain]

She goes tense when she hears Ed's voice and sees him sit up—even though she's grown to trust him, for some reason the fear and hostility he showed her in their first meeting is what comes most strongly to her mind now. She pushes those thoughts down at once, though, and shifts her sitting position so she can look at him properly.

"Snow? Surely thunder means it'll be a rainstorm, doesn't it?"

She doesn't know why she's so sure it'll be rain, but she is. It feels right.

cw: blood

[forfeits]

Ed doesn't sleep well in this place, does not often dream, but when he we does they're vivid, dark dreams. He hates sleeping, but knows it's a necessary evil, and curls up on his side of the too-cold house, striving for rest.

He wakes with a start, however, sitting up gasping for breath, sweat stippling his forehead. The thunder isn't too loud, but it's a sound so foreign to this place, he's sure he's imagining it. He turns -- perhaps some of his companions heard it, too? "Hey, did you --"

There's blood everywhere. The walls, the floors soaked in it, and a strange, distant hissing sound. "Wh- What? Al? Freya? Guys?" He pushes himself up, back pressed to the wall, and that's when he sees it -- the finely drawn lines of a transmutation circle. In the center of the room, at the middle of the circle, he sees it -- a slumped figure that is not quite human at all, with shifting bones and skin, gurgling and hissing falling from what might be a mouth.

"Al? Al?" Edward screams, the sound raw and sharp, as he stumbles forward tripping over something, which is no doubt one of his travel mates' sleeping spots. But when he looks upon it, he can only see a shattered, broken suit of armor. Angry tears pour down his cheeks, and he staggers backward, sliding down one wall, burying his face in his hands, gripping and pulling at his hair, breaths coming in tight, wheezing gasps.

[armoured]

It's actually Al that Ed trips over.

But it's not the same scene that Al sees, not by a long way. He sees Ed tripping over him, younger and smaller than he is now. He's just got his automail leg and he hasn't quite learned to walk on it yet. Every step is agony for him, the nerve endings raw and even bleeding through the automail connection with how hard Ed is pushing himself... pushing himself for Al.

"B-Brother! Brother, please don't do this, you don't-- I can wait, I--"

He wants to cry himself. He wants to so badly, but he can't. He can't cry, and Ed is hurt, all because of this stupid body.

[forfeits]

The sound of metal against his foot is enough to draw his attention, but not for long. He can't help but see the shattered armour, the bits of metal everywhere. His heart thuds too quickly in his chest, shaking him to the very core.

"W-What happened, Al? Al talk to me!" He can hear his brother's voice but he's sure it's a figment of his imagination. There's so much blood, and his brother's armour is destroyed. It has to be a trick -- maybe Envy? Were they here after all, just when he'd let his guard down?

"Dammit, Al! Why'd you have to be... you can't -- I can't do this -- "

Shoving violently away from the wall, he reaches out to touch the fragments of metal, which just so happens to be Alphonse, but just over him, he sees the gurgling, disturbing creature they brought back to life.

He tries to scream, tries to speak, but only rasps come from his throat, his fingers shaking, his whole body racked with sobs.