[log] Blackscreen of Death [closed]

[rubikscomplex]

Characters: Gregory House, James Wilson, Will Graham, Castiel, Stephen Strange, Gabriel Gray, Billy Kaplan, Vanitas
Location: The High School
Date: Night 395
Summary: Meeting up in the high school and making bad decisions with the tablets.
Warnings: Warnings will be in subject headers if they come up.

[A fairly large building labeled Norfinbury High School. All the windows are blacked out. The lights here work, but you wouldn't know at first--they only turn on when someone is in the hallway or in the room, but lack of attention means it can take anywhere between thirty seconds to a minute before they actually respond. The hallways seem to stretch, the shadows seem to shiver. Each door is decorated with a prophet symbol, and the walls are covered in graffiti honoring the prophet and talking about killing sinners. Sometimes the doors rattle as you pass, or someone knocks on the other side.

A couple of classrooms still look normal enough, except for the black and red prophet tapestries adorning the walls and covering the windows. Still, the desks are in order, there's a board at the front, and they look like you'd expect out of a high school classroom. The front office, too, looks normal, as if it was actually used for administration--though, of course, there's no sign of the computers that must have been there.

The nurse's office, meanwhile, seems to have been converted to a surgical unit. There's long-dried blood everywhere, as if no one ever bothered to clean up. Indeed, footprints can be seen scattered around, implying people just wandered through while the blood was still wet. It looks like some people were even barefoot. The cafeteria has had all its tables attached to the walls, some covering the windows. The chairs are scattered around, some knocked over and some sitting quietly. There's no food to be found here. The library has been emptied of books, and all the shelves turned to face the wall, with eye symbols drawn on their exposed backs. The gymnasium has had its floor cut into, with eye marks carved all over. There are bleachers, but they're stuck closed, so it would be difficult to open them.

As for the rest of the classrooms? They're filled with thick blackness. Going inside causes all the symptoms of suffocation, and any light shone or brought in is immediately swallowed up.]

Comments

[rubikscomplex]

Pre-Tablet Seance
[House wanders the halls of the school, but he comes back again and again to the nurses office, frustrated that there's not more here that he can discern. It looks like a lot of footsteps and not much else. But what were they doing? Converting people. Had they used the same 'technique' as those in the tower? They never had found out what final conversion looked like. But House suspects the pyres and the tunnel of skeletons are testament to it.

He's crouched down and places his fingers to the edge of a kid's footprint.]

What were they even teaching you here?

Post-Tablet Seance
[House smacks his dead tablet against the wall in frustration.]

Oh, for the love of... Come on.

[Snapping at his tablet doesn't seem to do anything. At all. Still, it feels good to smack it against something hard a few more times for good measure. Just to be sure.]

Pre-Seance

[godsspeed]

Obedience and fear. [ comes Castiel's best guess from the other side of a blood-flecked, dentist's-office-green cloth room divider, where he's currently standing and examining an empty cot. ]

Maybe anatomy as well. But mostly those two.

[rubikscomplex]

[House can't help it. He jumps because Jesus Christ. Who stands behind a divider like that silently when they hear someone else come in?]

Anyone ever tell you it's people like you who're the leading cause for heart attacks?

[He rises up and rubs a hand over his face.]

Obedience maybe. Pretty sure they were trying to break everyone from fear. Just make them emotionless husks or whatever.

[godsspeed]

[ People who don't have a strong grasp on the concept of having a physical, uniplanar presence, mostly. ]

Sorry. [ He's maybe a little bit sheepish, but not very. Enough to make him edge out from behind the curtain, at least, drawing a bottle of mouthwash from one of the inner pockets of his coat as he does so. ]

I have this for you. It lists iodine as one of its ingredients. I don't know if it has enough of it to be useful as a stain, but it seemed worth it to take it with me.

[rubikscomplex]

[House stares at the bottle he's been handed for a long moment. Iodine. Stain? What?]

Oh, that. Cool! Now I just need some mold. You're not gonna pull that outta your pocket, are you?

Post-Seance

[thewarningafter]

[Well, this is a hell of a thing. Beyond the obvious, very immediate problems created by the loss of their tablets, Stephen has realized in the last hour just how much he's come to rely on the device to keep him occupied even while he's had to navigate the network so carefully since his last death. He keeps itching to call someone and ask if their tablet is down, too, but obviously he can't. He keeps itching to look things up, reread old conversations, work on the census...and none of it is available to him.

After a little while he gets up to walk around the school, hoping that stretching his legs will help clear his mind. When he hears a sound ahead of him he creeps more quietly around the corner and --]

Aw, hell.

[It had to be this asshole.]

[rubikscomplex]

['Hell' is about right. House looks up and over to see Stephen Strange, and pulls a face. Great. No tablet and he's stuck with this guy for a night.]

Keep walking, Stranger Danger. Your little idea just fried my tablet.

[thewarningafter]

[Yeah, that figures. Stephen isn't inclined to stick around, but--with the tablets down he'd like to get whatever information is available to him in person.]

Anything else happen, or only the battery drain warning?

[rubikscomplex]

Battery drain. [At least it's not only him, then.] Says they're still around, at least, but all that power Winter fed to us is getting sucked into the void.

Post-seance

[termineur]

[ He walks around a corner a few minutes later, shining House right in the eyes for a moment with his flashlight. ]

Oh. Hey. Your tablet went kaput too, huh? 'Rapid battery drain' message?

[rubikscomplex]

How many of you people are around, anyway?

[At least Gabriel isn't as irritating to deal with as Stephen. He stops smacking his tablet and just sighs.]

Yeah as soon as I sent out my message, I get that, then the black screen of death.

[termineur]

Yep. Just as ominous as ever. Thanks, Norfinbury. Although it does make me think the data collective is still around, just not- active or whatever.

[ He sighs. ]

It's me, Stephen, Vanitas, and Billy, by the way. And whoever else decided a cult hotspot was a good place for the seance.

post-seance/wild card

[darkincrement]

[ Did House want more of this merry band of travelers? Vanitas waits until after everyone does the tablets don't work song and dance before he's making his appearance. ]

Having fun?

[rubikscomplex]

I'm always having fun.

[Said with a growl in the voice before House just chucks his useless tablet into a nearby void classroom and waits for the sound of it hitting the wall or floor. It doesn't come.]

You still got a working tablet?

Sorry I totally blanked on this one

[darkincrement]

No. It's now just a stupid paper weight.

[ Or something to throw at Strange. ]

Let me guess, rapid battery drainage?

Post-seance, OTA

[thewarningafter]

[For a while after their tablets die and nothing else happens Stephen sits quietly, the black-screened device still held loosely in his hands as he gazes into space, thinking. He glances up when there's movement near him.]

Think I managed to kill everyone this time?

[It's a dumb question to ask when he'll believe the answer. Or maybe it's a cry for help, asking for someone to give him reassurance he'll actually accept for once in his life.]

[termineur]

[ It's Gabriel, coming back to him in the darkness after an initial look through the place. He's not sure how much battery he has left on his flashlight, so its off in the more familiar areas. ]

Are you really that much a glutton for punishment, that you'd ask that now?

[ He sighs a little. ]

No, I don't think you did. We'll figure it out.

[thewarningafter]

[Caught him. Stephen smirks, but it's fleeting.]

Every time I think I've seen everything this place can throw at us, there's some new problem I didn't foresee. We'll want to monitor our condition; you were right about the bunker being the best place if it's affecting the nanomachines' functionality as well.

[termineur]

Yeah. Plus, I figure it's a natural gathering place if the tablets really are all out. The anomalies can't get in there unless they're let in, so that's convenient. And it's where we seem to need to get through in order to continue 'following the spiral'.

What sort of monitoring are you wanting to do?

[ It's an honest question- he figures Stephen would know better than he would. It's not like he noticed the last time he went evil (not until Sherlock pointed it out, anyway). ]

threadjacks are welcomed

[darkincrement]

[ Vanitas is just going to throw his tablet at a wall. ]

Just the tablets.

[ Good job. Vanitas sounds cranky, because Mania is a bitch to really keep in check without something to do. Which means socializing with those around him. This sucks. ]

threadjacks are welcomed

[thewarningafter]

[Yeah, well, Stephen's not thrilled either.]

There'll be others with working tablets. People who didn't participate.

[He hadn't been sure of that, but Gabriel said so and now it's a fact.]

[darkincrement]

[ Throw the tablet, Strange. Violence is fun. ]

Who knows. [ If he was dumb enough to go along with this, then others will likely jump at it. Crossing his arms as he decides to stare after where ever his tablet landed. ]

Not like we'll find out any time soon.

[godsspeed]

Possibly indirectly, yes. It depends on how long the tablets being broken lasts. Without being able to coordinate with each other, we're not likely to make it much further along the spiral before this cycle ends.

[ what was that Stephen did you want Castiel's completely honest assessment, because that's what you're getting. ]

[thewarningafter]

...Right.

[Possibly allows an escape from the immediate yes that he'd feared, but only a temporary one. Castiel's right; communication is what's allowed them to progress this far and he's just taken that away from himself and others.]

I'm worried about the impact on the nanomachines' power supply as well.

[godsspeed]

[ That's not something Castiel had thought of, and his brow furrows as he thinks it over. He's aware that what he's about to ask may be a stupid question, but it's not like he was pretending to know how any of this works before. ]

Do they draw from the same source as the tablets?