DM POST
[member="Oran Shule"] / [member="Liya"] - Hawkins Hospital was the sort of place it was nice not to be alone. That was true even in those few weeks for which it saw walk-in’s and people who truly needed help.
If you were left alone, you were ripe for the picking.
Alone meant vulnerable.
Alone meant the best choice to be snatched for experimentation.
So it was lucky when the two met up. The nurse lay twitching on the once-shiny floor, the last nerve impulses causing her to shake like an insect freshly crushed. All the sudden, the intercom system - scratchy, disused, ear-piercing static announcing its activation - broadcasted the voice of a faceless man.
“Nurse Bowig!? I thought I told you a full week ago that we had this organ transplant surgery scheduled for today and yet...I don’t see you outside the operatory waiting for me as you know is expected of you! Nurse Bowig...if I don’t see you in the next two minutes coming down this operatory hallway, I will come find you myself and add your organs to the pile!”
The intercom clicked off with a hiss of static. Getting away from the nurse’s corpse would probably be a good idea. Hiding it before getting away from it might be an even better one.
[member="Zahori Denko"] / [member="Asheda Tyr"] - Lily dropped another knife. Then another. Then another. She stopped caring about size after the fourth or fifth one, dropping them indiscriminately in the hopes that she might see a brilliant scree of blood bloom over those white and yellow-rot bones. Now that would be a beautiful tableau for the gods that were watching, wouldn’t it?
But Lily was a woman of swiftly-changing whims. It would be easier to catch the wind than to keep up with her mind.
Her departure was marked by a cackle.
But she wouldn’t have to be near in order to challenge her new toys though. Deep within the short tunnels that came off the pit - like ant tunnels, viewed from the side in some glass case - potential sacrifices that hadn’t made the cut groaned in the throes of expiration. Theirs was a slow, agonizing death. There was something about that pit that made it take forever to die, even when they’d long decided it was preferable. As Asheda climbed the wall, it would be easy not to notice the hole in its side among so many bones, strange patches of shade. But all the sudden an arm, skeleton-thin, reached out and grabbed for her. It would drag her in, break her neck, and eat her for sustenance if she wasn’t careful! It would use her for fuel so it could escape instead.
[member="Venthis Zambrano"] - Eloise Hawkins had her favorite students. Admittedly, she was a sucker for teacher’s pets. Oh, those adoring faces looking up at her, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, waiting for an education that might put them above the usual rabble that populated the New City. Maybe some of them would climb high enough to reach the Upper 50, bringing their degrees with them to great heights. (Of course, Eloise could have been interpreting those large eyes and open expressions incorrectly. It was possible it was acting in the hopes of pleasing her and escaping her, or terror. It could have been terror.)
But some she simply could not bear to part with. Some simply had to stay within her beautiful school’s halls!
The figure scurrying back and forth within the bright light at the end of the hall was one such pet. Preston had been an exemplary student. True, his enrollment may not have been voluntary, but as always - Eloise could overlook that. He’d been so smart. So studious! And so she’d asked him...very politely…to stay.
As Venthis quickly ducked back from the doorway after sneaking a glance, Preston’s head followed. It appeared in the doorjamb, leaning out as it peeking from around the corner. But he didn’t look human. He was jet black, skin like the depth of black hole that shimmering and threatened to draw Venthis inward. But perhaps most unnerving were his eyes - completely white, as if someone had plucked the iris and pupil right out of them.
“Hi,” Preston said, friendly.
And then his arm came around the corner - long, WAY too long as it stretched towards Venthis with claws like bowie knives looking to impale him in to the wall. Or crush him with a fist, that’d be fine too.
“You new here?”
The rest of Preston’s body came slithering out behind him. Both arms too long. Legs too short. His proportions were totally wrong, unnerving. He kept coming closer.
“Because I haven’t seen you before, and I could use a friend.”
He tried pinning Venthis to the wall again, the impossibly long reach of his arms making him nearly inescapable.
[member="Zul Grimm"] / [member="Kyle Raymus"] / [member="Causstik Rahn"] - Oh it was turning in to quite the mess in the boar pens. Guts and blood steamed on cool tile flooring, prods ripped from their droids but left unused as attackers gained their footing rattling along on the ground, droids flipped over with tracks spinning in the air. The two who’d been shackled to the floor had escaped and left an unmistakable mark of their willingness to do anything to escape. Elsewhere on Maena, crowds jostled to betting pools, taking their earnings or their losses with appropriate expressions of glee or anger.
But oh things were changing!
A newcomer to the pair showed up - the crowd’s voracious Pirate comedian! (Maenans had a twisted sense of humor. A Trandoshan snacking in the middle of a murder-factory was right up their alley.) An unexpected twist, and all the more welcome for it.
The electric boar prods however, danced along with loud rattles. Their electricity would run out eventually, but they were set to hold a charge for at least a half-hour. That way if a boar ripped one off, the prod would at least encourage it to back off from the droid it was attacking. For now, all those that had been left behind, or the ones on flipped over droids, vibrated along the floor with intensity. This was even more dangerous than it sounded at first however, as there was a lot of liquid on the floor. Blood. Skull fluids. Eye fluids. Condensation from the fluctuating temperatures of an ill-tended building.
The first prod hit a patch of water, the searing sound of electricity cascading through the room. It kept dancing away, the puddle no longer electrified. But some of the puddles were huge, connected. Some of them reached all the way out to where our trio now stood, though perhaps they had started to separate and move. They better hope so. All the sudden half the room was electrified as prods dipped in to puddles spanning huge amounts of the floor.
[member="Jacob Crawford"] / [member="Imogen Daniels"] - The Classroom searched, the poor pitiful Porg mutilated. Stabbed then stabbed again, Jacob seemed to have lost himself in such frenzy that even the pained peeps and rasping shrills would not remove him from his goal. He’d let fingers press in to gushing wounds and pull apart the soft feathers, taut flesh and red meat of the creature. Blood on his hands, organs left warm and strewn down the edge of the bookcase the Sith took flight but - dear viewers - just how observant had he been of his surroundings? Only time could tell now.
The scene he stumbled out upon was now one he shared with poor Imogen Daniels.
The hall was long, lockers extending down the entire left-hand side, ceiling panels collapsed, coils of wire stretching out from the darkness above. There were two other rooms on the right wall, both doors sealed as unflinchingly as the one that had briefly held Jacob. At the very end a Boys and Girls Refresher flanked a shockingly clean, dripping, water fountain. And from there the path Left or Right would be their next question.
But first. . . !
The man continued to toy with Imogen, an arm propped up against the lockers while he drove that blade in and out of the metal. Each stab weakening the integrity of the barrier, each thrust of his arm making him wheeze and huff most hideously. Then on one particularly rugged stroke of the blade, the girl assertively kicked, and a fold of metal bit his knuckles to the bone making that blade retract faster than it had this whole little game he was playing with her.
Blood sloshed out of the wound wildly, and he merely grunted. Stepping backwards while he stared in at Imogen through a lattice of penetration wounds.
“Mmm. . I love when cute little things fight back!” The man growled, spit flying from his mouth.
“It makes it so much more fun when I make them hurt!” He gave a flick of his injured hand, the grip of the obscenely large knife wet in his hand, blood spattering against and in to the locker Imogen was stuck inside of.
The man was a mere moment away from continuing the assault, then the words of Jacob rang loud - followed by a rapid reply from Imogen. He turned to face the wild looking man, fingers clenched tight around the handle of his blade, his wrist flexing inward. He stood somewhere well over six feet, his weight easily double Jacobs.
“Don’t worry thing,” The words were aimed at Imogen,
“I’ll leave him alive just enough to watch.”
[member="Xin Boa"] / [member="Darren Onyx"] - Out in the City, in spaces and blocks and levels far removed from the place they stood a collective shriek must have rang in hideous agony. The Butcher - Hank Hawkins had fallen. While only one of a massive array of colorfully maddened individuals this little Game Show utilized lottery style year-after-year. The Hawkins had grown to garner a special reputation for their style of New City Fun.
Halloween came but once a year, and the New City cherished it ever so greatly!
To see him fall so early, so soon after the Television Waves had began to Broadcast to every HoloVision in the entire City - it was a shocking thing to behold! Contestants? Sure! They were mutilated, tortured, and slaughtered wholesale! But one of the Celebrity Psychopaths!? NO!
So there, in the whir of mechanical leads and rotary tracts and dangling chains with industrial meat hooks. Hank Hawkins lay. Xin had taken flight, making his way in to the next room, Darren now seemingly coming to his aid.
The room was narrow and dark, the walls black from soot and smoke. Tables stood vigil along the wall opposite of them, meat grinders, butchers twine and needles, cleavers, boning knives and meat mallets. Spice Rubs and Mop Sauces. It was clear now they were in the preparation room, with the door on the opposite end - bleeding all of the wood smoke in through the seams and frame - leading to the Maenan Fire Brick Smokehouse.
No sooner than Darren had offered Xin his hand in assistance did the door he just exited seal shut with a violent slam, shockingly, no amount of abuse would loosen or open it. And there, staring out through a grime stained window, The Butcher stood, his body hunched, blood seeping from a dozen wounds. With one hand he pulled the blade that had lodged itself in to the thickest and hardest part of his skull, a waterfall of crimson instantly overflowing and clouding his eye a deep color of red. Side to side, his head shook. No. He still had fight left in him!
With his eyes on Darren specifically, his hair-lip curled even higher and then suddenly he turned and lumbered off painfully slow. Knowing exactly whom he would be placing on his Butcher’s Block next.
As for Xin and Darren? Forward in to the Smokehouse seemed the only path for them now. But perhaps first, some first aid? Maybe something from the prep stations could be of help?
[member="Lark"] / [member="Vulpesen"] - What kid hadn’t stood in the hallways of school and wondered at where they were going, how their lives would be different if they were standing somewhere else? Formative years, time for reflection. It could be argued that the Force changed that - replaced it, perhaps more effectively than any harsh experience within a school’s walls. The learning couldn’t be replaced perhaps - those stupid equations one would never use again, the specifics of some war that the galaxy would just repeat and repeat and repeat. But it could be argued that Lark, and most certainly the Master with him, had been molded by fires more valuable.
It was that very possible quality that had Eloise Hawkins watching the pair with even more attention than her all-seeing eyes usually afforded ‘guests’ within her halls.
Within the room that spilled bright light, there was absolutely nothing unexpected. Rows of desks sat in neat lines. Bookshelves held textbooks, some ratty and well-used, others new and as shiny as the pristine surroundings. The white tile floor only made the fluorescents harsher. There was no one there. There were drawers to explore, small cubbies under desks that might hold something useful were someone inclined to check.
It was a full minute before the scrape of chalk on chalkboard screeched through the room. There was no floating chalk, no one standing holding it either. Instead the words simply appeared on their own, beautifully flowing, feminine cursive.
“I’ll tell you where I am, if you pass the quiz.”
For a moment it was entirely unclear what that meant. But then the door slammed closed. And then something black, stringy, runny-cloying like raw egg, started oozing out of the doorknob’s lock. It fell to the floor, coiling around itself for a moment, and then inching along the floor. Its body reached out, contracted, reached out, contracted, dragging itself towards the pair.
And then it started coming out of the ceiling. From every seam, black ooze started dropping, crawling, spinning itself towards Lark & Vulpesen. Then it came out of the floor. Then it started rolling out of desk cubbies. From every crevice, crack, or opening something poisonous sought the only living heartbeats in range. If they were allowed to reach the pair, they would work together to bind them, wrap them up entirely, bring them to the ground where they might at the very last...cover the eyes of both ‘visitors’, blinding them forever with acid they’d secret from their leech-like bodies.
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Jorryn Fordyce
+ anyone who posts overnight
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