DM POST
[member="Jacob Crawford"] / [member="Imogen Daniels"] - The distance seemed to linger on endlessly. Jacob and Imogen, side-by-side, fleeing at top speed from the shade that blackened the Hall behind them. Blackness so thick it seemed almost solid. Cries bit at their heels, the banshee wail of a thousand spirits. Eyes, reflective and white, looming ever closer until the darkness was a mere foot away. The light vanishing quicker than their legs could carry them.
Things were getting dire, the sinister devils breathing over shoulder. Ghostly hands grasping feebly at flesh and clothes, the touch was cold. So cold. Flesh left red and mind numbingly sore from each attempt to secure grasp and hoist back in to the freezing abyss.
Was it real? It felt real. But could it all have been in their head? Did they dare to find out?
Colors skewed, reality warped, the hall that never ended! There was another turn coming ahead, if they stayed this course they would surely be swallowed whole at any moment! Push. Fight. Run faster!
Approaching rapidly, as they began to pull away from the dark void, directly on their right the stairs to the Science loft were locked behind a powerful gate. It had three separate combination disc locks that would deny any and all access further in this direction, thus restricting the pair to the horrors of the eldritch darkness and the rest of the journey towards the stairs that would lead them down towards the Cafeteria, 1st Floor and Gymnasium.
Warmth.
Light.
It awaited just on the other side. But had they been paying attention? Could they decipher the codes and open the locks?
Blessed New City, we shall see.
[member="Lark"] -
“What a polite young man!” Eloise exclaimed, despite the disappointment of denial.
She did love this school. It was a place of escape. Everybody needed that, a place no one would follow - a retreat, in which to totally, completely let go of all the things that felt like wearing a mask. Eloise loved her husband, of course. Hank was a provider, and a man who didn’t stop her from doing the things she loved or pursuing her dreams. But Hank was...not smart. And she hadn’t married in to a family known for its intelligence. Of course, there was a certain animal cunning to the Hawkins. They would not have survived for so many generations otherwise. But they would not be winning prizes for their contributions to math and science.
She loved her husband. But she couldn’t speak to him about intellectual things. Within the halls of her school, she could be herself.
As Lark disappeared towards the kitchens, Eloise went perfectly still for a moment save for the turn of her head as she tracked his movements. There was the faint slicing hiss of metal over metal as he searched counters, no doubt for a weapon of some kind. The slap of shoes on tile. The hum of refrigeration units. Had she wanted she might have just viewed him from afar, her all-seeing eyes focusing on his trail. But instead she dissolved, a pile of black sludge left behind on the table she’d used as a perch.
Seconds later, she reappeared, this time as a black acidic stain on the floor that quickly started coalescing at Lark’s feet. Her arms, black as her form though quickly returning to the pale alabaster of her bone-like skin, reached out and tried to latch on to his legs. Her touch burned like something caustic, the tile sizzling loudly as she dragged herself up out of the hole through which she traveled - a warren of sorts, burrowed through the Force in unconventional fashion. It did not spread from her place of emergence, though it appeared as if falling in to it would leave one tumbling through eternity.
Long fingers continued to scrabble for his legs, burning through a pant-leg with a hiss as her touch dissolved fabric. She just wanted to latch on and sear some SENSE in to him!
“I wouldn’t call it conventional,” she growled in retort, sure if she could just grab him and melt through flesh and dissolve bone he wouldn’t be able to go anywhere at all! He’d have to stay and learn. She’d give him his legs back… she promised! She started to try and crawl up, grabbing at his clothes, her touch threatening to dissolve right through his skin to organs that would spill from caustic holes. Her breathing was ragged, hungry, obscene - whistling through a throat that was still reforming as she took her shape.
[member="Kyrel Ren"] / [member="Halron Corr"] - Almost always, callous personalities hid something vulnerable. Beneath an uncaring veneer must lie some old wound, something the seemingly dispassionate person had never healed until they were one big scar. It was easier to ignore it, after all. It would be easy to assume that something horrible had happened to Bill Hawkins. But the truth was - he was just missing something fundamental. It made him less of a man. And so he’d embraced being less and made it something more.
“Why?” he asked, sniffing deeply from the barrel of his gun, eyes rolling back in his head obscenely.
“I wanted to? I read somewhere once that the thing that makes violence easier to think about is the motivation. We understand a man killing another man over talking to his woman, or someone getting shot in their convenience store as it was getting robbed. Sad, sure - but we see why it happened. Hell, we can even stomach them freak serial killers even if we can’t understand why they did it. We just need to hear the reason. Then it makes the sheep sick to their stomachs, but they ain’t so scared.” Bill stood, pale and reed-strong and willowy, seemingly unaffected by a man on the edge wielding a rusty knife, or his hugely-muscled companion.
“But I don’t got a reason. I don’t got a why. I do it because it’s fun and I ain’t got anything better to do.” He rolled his shoulders, collarbones cracking at an alarming decibel.
“Now hurry up. You guys are boring me.”
With that, he turned his gun on the remaining lamps and shot one right through the center. Instantly, air seemed to leave the room as a wall of fire devoured oxygen as fuel. Bill, cruel and arrogant but one of the smartest among the Hawkins bunch, had high-tailed it out of the room the second he’d set off his secondary trap, slamming the reinforced door behind him. The sound of locks chunking and clunking shut on the other side could be heard even over the sound of the fire growing wildly.
“Oh I forgot to mention,” Bill’s voice filtered back in to the room, seemingly from some hidden intercom.
“You never had to kill her. The wall behind the lamps is soft - you could probably kick or punch your way through to the other side! Sucks doesn’t it!?” His cackle was cut off by his removing his finger from the speaker system.
It was useful information. The wall behind what was now a sheet of fire tall enough to lick the ceiling could most likely be easily torn through to escape. The lamps had been two feet or so from the back wall, meaning there might be a corridor in which to stand if one worked fast enough. But no matter what, accessing and breaking through that back wall now meant being burned - arms, hands, back, legs, feet, whatever was too close to the wall as the men tried to break through and escape. And the longer they debated on their best option, the hotter and larger the fire would become, making it impossible to escape without burning to death.
It was break through, or take their chances trying to find an alternative.
