Stormy

Masks were removed, showing for some of those precious moments their faces, their true nature, as the masquerade continued, albeit, dancing to a different tune. And their hostess was becoming increasingly unnerving. Yet, somehow, Stormy had not fully committed to her decision.

The bassoons and oboes of the fathomless blue only she heard soothed – no – subdued her mind. It was a surreal change to the routine Stormy had allowed herself to slip into, coddled by comfort and familiarity, and somehow she could not quite grasp the cold, grey instruments of pain and murder that were postured before her. Stormy rubbed her temple. She watched her feet shuffle and squash dirt and dust that caked the slabs of stone floor.

IT. IS. SOON. TIME.

These words had no voice, rather, they appeared in her mind as a deep and yawning understanding, a sentiment transferred to her across the ephemeral veil. There was a flash of the octopus, but something was different now…

BANG!

The thunder-crack was near deafening. Stormy whirled her attention towards it. In such a hard and flat space, the sound echoed and rang, fading eventually into a harsh ringing, and then into silence. Except it wasn’t silence; everyone began moving and acting, dancing to a new song of panic replacing that quiet string interlude of the ever-mounting tension.

Stormy saw two bodies crumple, one onto the tracks, and the other into a corner. The police officer, that much she had gleamed even during her feverish state, quickly received help. Seeing the other man struggling to his feet, bleeding, and sweat pouring from his brow, Stormy felt obliged to aid him in some way. The world was uneven as she rushed over to him.

Yes, this was surreal, but now it was mortally so; reality was now a frozen knife-point, pressed into the small of her back.

“Darling,” She began, once in front of him, her arms flapped at her side, her hands reaching, and then shying away from him, “Uhm, I think you should lie down dear. You don’t look so great.” She looked around and gave an empty laugh, “Or maybe I can help you?”

It was then that another bolt of lightning split the world, and left Stormy’s ear throbbing. Turning from Oedipus, she almost gagged at the carnal amalgam that stretched from the body: globules of parietal and occipital lobe mingled with other viscera, blood, and shards of skull. Stormy stared, her hand slowly rising to cover her wide-open mouth. Tears fell freely.

Abandoned.

Zoe wasn't there; she had just stood by as her younger brother's physical body was destroyed. In fact, she had just been quiet since coming into the subway. Why did this happen? He thought he could depend on her! He thought their bond was unbreakable! William Ascot, sitting on the grassy plain, breathed in and out; he couldn't allow himself to appear patethic and weak...even though he was.

Forsaken.

Do not whine. Do not bitch. That was what he had learned from being bullied, from being beaten in school. Breath in, breath out. He shivered as he breathed in. He allowed himself to cry; he loathed himself for being so self-centered. Then, he forced himself into something resembling calm. He longed for greatness? Well, it was time for him to grab it! Ascot forced himself to think of becoming more powerful, of becoming better than he once was. Then his emotional state collapsed once more.

Lost.

He couldn't do it; he was nothing without his sister, nothing without someone to guide and support his efforts. He lacked resolve, and copying Anime cliches without seeing what said cliches were built on, it would not give him that. He had to find strength...from within.

Now, calm down.

As he waited, as he stamped on his impatience, Ascot realized where he did wrong. He lacked moderation. He either depended too much on others or cut them off entirely for 'weakening' him. He had to find a middle ground. He breathed in again, letting his sadness and anger and despair settle. He was stronger than this, he knew it. Deep, deep inside, he knew that he had a shard of decency within him, one that kept him trying to get better.

Life may be one constant struggle for survival...but it shouldn't be.

That was true, but where did it come from? That was less relevant than his other thoughts. He was William Ascot; he was The Prodigy. He will not yield to mere internal demons. Nor will he be so engrossed in it that he was going to ignore others and their plight. The young man looked around, seeing who else was there with him. Saffron was first in his mind, then the Emotionally Wounded Man who had shot himself in the mouth. After that was the Cop, the Girl in Hoodie and Stormy. All else? All else faded into the background.

He walked forwards, wondering who to choose to approach first. He chose the Emotionally Wounded Man, although it was only because Saffron would have refused his aid. Walking towards Tristan, he would say once he was close enough:

"Hello, I'm William Ascot. What's your name?" A light smile graced his face as he asked the question. His gloom had lifted and he was in his element once more. But Ascot didn't ignore Tristan's potential mood, the storm of emotions he was going through as well. He just hoped to shine some light inside that. Why? Because he enjoyed helping people IRL, as opposed to online. He sat down beside the former cult member, gazing into his eyes and seeing the pain. It drew him like a moth to fire.

Gazing at Saffron again, the boy would feel ashamed for not being there for the person he admired. But at the same time, he felt that he couldn't just force a bond to form; not when he, Ascot, was selfish and egotistic. But the emotionally wounded man? He radiated pain that Ascot cannot just ignore, and issues that, although they were not curable at all - most traumas were not - called out for someone to show the person who held these scars kindness. Or maybe Ascot was just deluding himself?

@Redward@MechonRaptor@Etranger@Viatos

A terrible sound, a terrible darkness, and then something - light in white and ruin-red, pressure and the promise of maelstrom - happened. The world was being torn apart down to its bones, the sky was falling and above there was a color that didn't exist, he could feel the equator of the universe splitting into abyss and then there was soft earth and grass beneath his feet, and someone was asking him something. The hammer of his returning senses drove the thought from him for a moment; for a moment he was only there, empty and fragile as a blown-glass bowl.

Tristan looked around. He felt like he should be screaming, or drawing huge ragged gasps of air, but he wasn't. Everything was calm. Even his mind; he'd appeared absent adrenaline, absent anxiety, his heart beating steady and slow. It was only speeding up now, his overwhelmed thoughts slowing, two briefly separated dancers now approaching equilibrium once more.

His gun was gone.

"Fuck," he said. "What the fuck. Fuck."

Will's proximity suddenly registered and Tristan moved back unconsciously, seeking space. Nothing he was seeing made any sense, and yet here it was. The others from the station and the thing that had taken the shape of the Ghost Girl. He didn't feel dead, and the tableau was too far from his conceptions of death, but he'd blown his brains out.

"...Tristan. Christ, you don't work at Johnny's too, do you?" Tristan shook his head and looked around. "Actually, nevermind."

I'm alive. He couldn't have given voice to the feeling the thought engendered; some strange and coiling thing, blue and green, its contours unfamiliar to him. But there was a lightness to his body wholly unrelated to its restored physical condition. It hadn't been his own, but he'd seen a second miracle: he'd seen faith rewarded. He couldn't tell if he should laugh or cry, so he did neither, his eyes lingering instead on the living cop, the hopeful killer, Tabitha, the array of employees and the rest of their newfound fellowship. He didn't look at the Ghost Girl.

The mask was in his hand. His fingers traced her - her? - sharp carbon edges idly as he turned back to the boy, raising his voice to carry past the two of them and make it an open question: "So...what happens now?"

The feeling of falling was incredible. Anni couldn't say if the feeling was because of whatever the Ghost Girl was doing to transport them or because of the tremendous rush of emotion and adrenaline as the train thundered toward and finally through her. Either way, for one dizzying moment Anni felt like she was falling--through space, through time, maybe even through the veil that held the Earth away from the mystical. Then her back was on solid ground. Her head continued swimming for a few moments more, but that, too, cleared quickly.

Anni opened her eyes.

Bright colors--vivid, verdant, vivacious--flooded her vision. Anni sat bolt upright, her eyes wide, and started turning her head each way--right, then left, then back again. Everything--from the grass, to the trees, to the sky, and yes, even the dirt--seemed so alive. It was the polar opposite of the grim, poorly lit station they had just left. No, far from that place of fear and death, this place was filled with life.

A wonderful, bubbly feeling gathered in Anni's chest. It flowed down through her legs and floated up into her head, until finally it burst out of her in a joyous, gleeful laugh. The young lady couldn't have stifled it even if she tried. Moments ago she was holding her skirts against a bleeding cop in the face of an oncoming train; now she was sitting in the promised world, very much not dead. It was like an answer to prayer, a witness after her faith.

The Ghost Girl spoke the truth. They were here. They were in Irriss.

Anni's eyes moved from flower to flower, then from flower to tree, then tree to grass, and from the grass to--people. Everyone was here. Not everyone was smiling and laughing like a child, though. Remembering the police officer, Anni spun around until she spotted him just a few strides away. She pushed herself toward him, half crawling and half jumping to reach him as quickly as she could. "Officer!" Anni called gently, kneeling at his side once again. "Officer..." Anni paused trying to remember the name he had used. She couldn't find it; too much was crowding her thoughts, and she struggled with people's names even without the swirling chaos. "...Sir?" she finished, simply for the sake of having a finish.

Michael's last moments on earth were occupied with the advent of at least two people rushing to his aid. He could make it out that the first one was the girl that had wanted to help drag that unconscious woman. It was certainly vexing to find her here, helping him so frantically. Didn't she believe there was another world awaiting them in death? Perhaps she was just acting on instinct? It didn't matter in the end, as Michael had little strength or speed to get up with, nor any care to think over questions of motivation. The other person that came to help was one of the people that had so readily jumped on the tracks the moment they had been prompted to do so. It really made him wonder just what was making these people act. As they tried to aid him in whatever way they could, Michael was sure he heard another shot ring out. Unable to see from his angle, he could only guess as to what had happened, but he could say for sure it wasn't pleasant.

Inevitably, the train came. At this point, Michael was almost pleased to see it. It was hardly a happy ending, but at least it was an ending. There was no point lingering on in this madhouse, bleeding out.

Yet it was not the end. Michael found himself in a verdant green countryside, as though whisked away to some pleasant haven. His wound was healed, and he felt no great pain. At first he was tempted to say he had reached the one and only Heaven, but a quick glance at his company put that thought to rest. They were all here, including ghost girl. Michael was fairly certain this bunch were not all showing up at the legitimate Christian heaven. It seemed it was true, there was another world on the other side of death. That, or ghosty was pulling one hell of an elaborate con on them. Michael started to wonder if he hadn't been wrong to act the way he had before. However, that thought quickly brought to his mind the fact that unless he had missed a big secret club meeting, nobody knew this was what awaited them. They had all acted on some measure of faith. Michael still wasn't entirely happy about how this had played out.

In lieu of acting on faith, he heard a certain someone calling out for an "officer". It was the girl he had confronted at the station, and the one that had tried to get him on his feet just before. "Uh....Mike Keahi, reporting for duty, ma'am." He said to her hesitantly. He wasn't sure what her great concern for him was, but he wasn't going to dig into it. In fact, he began to think about the more pressing concerns on his mind; the explanation they were owed by ghost girl, and the fact that the presence of just about everyone from the station meant his assailant was here too. Quickly searching, he spotted the nutcase that had cut him. He felt himself flare up in a defensive anger. It was hard to get past the fact he had been blatantly attacked, even if they were in a strange new world. As he tensed up, he felt something hard in his hand. He still had his gun. He had a sudden, violent urge to just shoot the bastard, but he restrained himself. He hardly cared about the man's well being right now, but he would be causing a scene if he shot him right now, and even trying to arrest him would be disruptive and dangerous. More than anything, he really wanted to hear whatever ghosty was going to say about this new world. People were already asking her for answers. He planned to listen, though he kept his gaze transfixed on the knife-wielder. There was no way he was going to let that guy get the drop on him here, nor was he going to let him go nuts on anyone else.

@TaroAndSelia @Scarescrow

A lot of things happened very quickly.

Shouting, screaming, banging, blood everywhere. Kate didn’t think she’d ever seen so much blood. On the policeman (could he really be called that anymore? He’d just drawn a gun on a group of, mostly, unarmed civilians.), on the other man, on the people who’d been standing near the man who- it was all dark though. Dyed brown by the dim lighting. Her fingers tingled, it was on odd sensation. Somewhere in the distance, there was a soft thump. Her bag had slipped of her shoulder and fell to the floor. The seam had split. Spilled pens and dog-eared textbooks across the concrete.

She blinked. In the distance, there was a sound like thunder. People saying things that possibly mattered? She couldn’t tell. Lights. It felt like the floor was shaking, even though it clearly wasn’t. She saw Saffron move- onto the tracks. He had his phone out, why did he have his phone out? Kate searched her pocket numbly for her own. It wasn’t there. It was in her bag. On the floor. Why was her bag on the floor? There was blood on the floor, if she left her bag there it would get blood on it. Could you get blood out of canvas, or was it like red wine and white carpets?

The not-thunder was louder now. Deafening. Saffron was on the tracks. Anni was running- jumping down- on the tracks. The thunder was deafening. The thunder was a train. Oh god. The thunder was a train and they were all on the tracks. She had to stop them. Had to stop this. How could she-

Running again. She was doing a lot of running, running tripping falling-

Light.

Warm air, the smell of flowers and grass, sunlight. They were underground, in the middle of the night, how-?

She collided with the ground with a soft “oof!”, spikes of grass digging into the bare skin of her arms. That was right. She’d been falling. Must have still been falling when… whatever that was happened. It was bright, and her eyes ached, white-hot spots burning onto her retina as they adjusted to the sudden change in lighting.

This was insane. Actually insane. Completely, utterly, nonsensical. Maybe she’d hit her head. Maybe this was some weird near-death-experience-phenomenon… thingy majig. She looked up, noticed the others. That guy who’d- the police officer, the one who’d attacked him. Anni going towards him, helpful and sweet as ever, and probably about to get herself killed. Again. Had she forgotten about the gun? The one currently still in his hand? Yes, he’d been hurt, but now, he looked fine. More than fine. That man was dangerous.

She picked herself up, quickly dusting herself off and storming towards them, “Hey! Don’t you talk to her! You can’t just threaten to shoot people and then pretend like it didn’t happen!” She came to a pause a few metres away from the officer, Keahi had he said his name was? She placed her hands firmly on her hips, slightly out of breath. She then noticed that his gaze was elsewhere - on the man that had attacked him. Oh god- that had all happened hadn’t it?

She paused, realising that she had, once again, confronted someone she knew to be dangerous. Right next to a someone else that she knew to be dangerous. Oh god. What was she- her heart stuttered, she let her hands fall to her sides, breath catching- no. She wasn’t doing this now. She felt her jaw set as she whirled on the other man.

“And you! What do you think you were doing! Attacking someone like that! Not that he didn’t deserve it off course, but that’s just… that’s just….”

Koda nearly ran for it, it was just one of those fight or flight situations where his brain freaked out and flooded his body with freak-out esque hormones. There were gunshots, there was blood, the lines between belief and doubt were so muddled as to be undefinable, and there was a great thundering coming towards them. He didn’t run though, he focused on the dying man instead, for the few seconds his attention counted for anyway, because in the next moment all was light and weightless.

He stopped breathing, unsure if that was his brain hitting maximum freak out and forgetting how or if that was a side effect of death-activated wormhole travel… but then he was out the other side and took a loud gasping breath as he collapsed into soft grass, staring down a peculiar purple flower, its petals dark except for the sprinkling of white dots like stars. It’s sudden appearance in his face was… intriguing enough to jar his brain into higher functions again, and he nearly cackled as he sat back on his ankles and got a good look at a whole other place- it had worked.

It had worked!

As the excitement built in him a razor sharp smile split his face. This was brilliant, there was so much to- a tug pulled his attention down. The dark tactile edges of the mask, so like the stubby arms of a small octopus, were tightening their grip on his fingers. Right, the Mask, the Semblance, the deal; he got to came here, and all he had to do was wear a magical mask.

As if anything was that simple. He looked up to the others, finding them orienting themselves, checking each other out, some were calming down from their freak outs, others not so much- and the officer was whole again, the attacker as well, and the suicide kid- and he noted at least one gun among them. Great. He looked back down, taking himself in: he was as he’d been just before being transported, being rebuilt obviously hadn’t been the same as cloning, and thank fuck for that - he did not miss boobs thank you very much.

He hadn’t heard the others’ words, except for some of that last shouted reprimand, so he wasn’t aware the Ghost Girl wanted to speak with them more, instead his attention finally managed to cling to the mask itself. It truly was like the piece of a domed helmet, he thought as he brought it closer to his face, inspecting the way the triangles it seemed to made of connected together at the barest of angles. It was shiny, like glass, but only barely see-through by its dark tinting. The edges misted and tugged at him with insignificant but noticeable force, giving him the impression it was at least as sentient as a plant, if not wholly sapient given it’s magical status.

There seemed to be some sort of circle beneath the center, about where his eyes would go. Was that some sort of interior lense? Was this mask made for a cyclops? Or perhaps it’s function was complex enough they only bothered to make the one big lens instead of two?

...and then his curiosity got the better of him, and the circle lit up with blue light, nearly blinding him in it’s intensity, and the mask’s short tentacles elongated and clutched his face. All at once everything faded to darkness, and it was as if he was drowning as something slick surged down his throat, energies flowing through him as if he was being electrocuted by the very air in his lungs- except there was no air in his lungs.

He coughed and gasped on the substance, but he made no noise by the way the mask had so vigorously smothered him. From the outside looking in it was obvious something was wrong by the way he jolted from his crouching position to stand and stumble backwards as if struck, and he clutched at his throat as if he could force it to open and take in air. Then, only a few seconds or so later, the mask was gone and he could see again.

But… he didn’t feel- he hit the ground on his knees and hunched over, painfully vomiting bright red all over pretty space-colored flower he’d admired before. The terrible feeling of something wrong inside him faded a bit, but he wasn’t an idiot; vomiting blood was Not Good, and vomiting blood after getting his throat roughed up by a magical mask? Very Not Good. Or maybe it was fine, Koda didn’t know shit about magic, he just knew it didn’t feel very okay at the moment.

He put a hand over his mouth, as if the gesture would keep anything else from coming up, and noticed several not very normal things all at once: First was the way his hand seemed to be smoking, a somehow physical darkness was misting off his skin- and a quick look over showed that was true of every part of him, though muted a bit except for his hands. Second was the metallic smell and a slick feeling of his nose, which proved to be bleeding. And third was the echoing jumbled sensation of his brain, making it hard to focus on much of anything, but he suddenly felt like he was standing in a crowded city street with thousands of voices shouting all at once- all of them hazy and far away and maybe not speaking any language he knew-

He vomited again, this time the same as the last, upchucking slick red liquid that could only be blood, but mixed here and there with swirls of black. This time when he looked up, sitting back from his hunched over position, he felt much lighter, though still in a very unpleasant way. He was decidedly not trusting anyone and their stupid magic masks ever again, working magical wormholes or not.

Unbeknownst to him there had been several other changes, powers he had yet to catch wind of, but also one last physically apparent change: his eyes were still brown, the irises at least, but the formerly white scleras were now dark red, an unnervingly inhuman look.

He didn’t look at the others, and in fact faced away from them as he sat back and held his stomach tightly and curled in on himself a bit, embarrassed that he’d actually threw up in front of them, much less threw up blood in what was a very concerning display of not being okay. Amazingly, the role of the scientist he’d embodied since birth, was now starkly absent as he tried to collect himself, not a single thought spared on calculations or observations or speculations, he just… needed a moment.

The night air weighed down on his shoulders like a cloak, blackness suspended like a filter over the spectra of colour which had retreated from the northern shores along with the sun so many hours ago. Half a moon seemed to peek out at him from time to time, an uproarious cacophony of unruly silence leaving him disquiet and wound as tight as a piano string as the massive, weighty doors of the Myriad Aegis Cathedral slammed silently shut behind him. A long, quiet sigh parted his lips, a gossamer wisp of breath writ upon the velvety parchment of the umbral night. Standing beneath the eves of the cathedral, he stood as still as the shadow of a corpse, now tenuously holding his breath, his weight shifted ever so slightly forward, to the balls of his feet. He reached a slender, delicate hand into the soft inner pocket of his double-breasted longcoat, retrieving a glinting silver object tethered to some hidden inner threading via a long, narrow chain. The clouds above parted momentarily, a shaft of flirtatiously impudent half-moonlight stabbing through the darkness to illuminate the emptiness of the grey gaze so firmly set upon the gentle sharpness of his young face. The silver object in his hand glinted in the pale glow as he depressed a small dial near where the chain met the circular backing. With a click, the intricately-carved face swung open, revealing the faceted glass of a watch within.

He continued to bate his breath as he locked his soft, steely eyes on the pocketwatch's second-hand, counting the last eleven seconds to himself. Finally, one last tock ushered in the eleventh hour, and within the space of a second, his exasperated sigh was totally lost by the massive surge of sound that sundered the silence about him. The Aegis Cathedral's bell tower was necessarily punctual, of course;
its deep tones tolled out across northern Lightbridge like the antecedent to a nightmarish clarion heralding Armageddon itself. He could feel the vibrations deep within himself, the crystalline clarity of the carillon resonating from deep beneath his solar plexus,
up through barely-audible overtones into his clavicles, and down through the bass depths of the tonal foundation, which seemed to plunge down somewhere around his lower abdomen and groin.

No, that's just the damnable butterflies. Get a grip, already.

The sound, at this distance, was all-consuming, and could be heard fading out across the expanse of the city, eleven separate notes that resonated and reverberated into a singular tapestry of echo. As the eleventh toll faded, receding in twisted contortions upon the ebbing tide of the nearby coastline, he set out. His footsteps were light upon the sidewalk, his black trainers seeming to glide along the cement noiselessly, even though they clearly made contact with the rough-hewn, well-traveled surface. As he made his way southwards, leaving the hulking majesty of the cathedral to bask in occasional moonbeams, it was as though he were enveloped in a bubble of complete silence. A stray breeze would dance around him, skittering the leaves and detritus along the walkways, but never fluttering the lapels of his calf-length coat, or even lifting a single sandy-blonde hair from its orderly mess upon his head. He walked with an air of casual determination, his eyes downcast, thin shoulders ever so slightly relaxed within the confines of his heavy coat; his steps were quick, but not quite rushed, and he held his pocketwatch in his left hand level with his chest, just before him. To an outside observer, it might appear that he was simply glancing down at a phone or other such device in his hand. Even up close, the few pedestrians who passed seemed to find themselves glancing away from him, moving out of his way. His trek southwards towards the centre of town was an almost perfectly straight line, despite various obstacles in the forms of street signs, passers-by, and even vehicles crossing through intersections. Any time he came upon something, his quiet little bubble of personal space seemed to simply excuse that something's existence for a moment as he made his way along.

I wonder if she... they... noticed me?

He'd given them an ample head start. The girl on the Bulwark, and the... other girl on the Bulwark. His left eyebrow twitched almost imperceptibly as he recalled stumbling upon them.

I'll have to be sure to repair that doorknob before the next service, he thought absently. It had been a necessary break-in. He'd kept the crumbled remains of the doorknob with him, as though he actually intended to somehow put it back together. Pfft, as if you can reassemble disintegrated brass shards. Get a grip, dammit. His lips parted and he heaved another soul-rending sigh. To his ears, the sound was completely normal; a bit sharp, for an intake of breath so coloured by self-directed exasperation, but otherwise just a normal, hefty sigh. The young man who passed him by as he sighed, though, heard nothing as he casually took an awkwardly large step to the right, allowing the dapper young lad in his quietness to slip by undisturbed. Probably a student at the nearby university, this particular pedestrian seemed to hesitate in his stride, glancing up from the path and turning his head as though to check behind him for some distraction. He stopped just a few degrees short of swinging around enough to actually look at the retreating back of the man he'd subconsciously stepped around, though, and simply shrugged the odd feeling off.

What the hell, how did he...?

His thoughts were interrupted as he came upon a large intersection. Across the expanse of asphalt, bedecked in the clashing hues of street lamps and traffic lights, sat the entry proper to the University grounds. This was where he needed to turn. He pivoted on his left heel, seeming to follow his pocketwatch through the fluid gesture as his heading swiveled Eastward. He continued thus for over half an hour, his gait and demeanour unchanging, his presence completely unnoticed by anyone or anything he passed by. His was a march of ceaseless silence, an orb of not-quite-there-ness that seemed to glide through the world around it with an anti-presence. He had to make sure to avoid certain parts of town where the air was more open, and even he would stick out against the backdrop of emptiness in the night; for this reason, he made his way through countless alleys, back-yards, and side-lots, just to lower his risk of detection. He could easily talk his way out of any encounter he couldn't avoid, but he really hadn't budgeted much extra time for "pleasantries." Not like anyone has any clue what the hell is 'pleasant' about it. People suck so hard... well, except for... His expressionless visage seemed, for an infinitesimal hint of a second, to shine with all the glee of the moon herself as his lips turned up in an honestly happy smile, the tail end of that last thought bringing him joyful clarity, if fleeting in brevity. As soon as the warmth of the smile flirted against the edges of his steel-grey irises, the lustre fell away and his face returned to its statuesque impassivity.

He continued for another several minutes, staring now at his pocketwatch with increasing intensity. His grip tightened with every passing moment, and he seemed poised on edge even as his gait, stride, and posture remained the same. It was as though he were waiting to notice something. A moment later, as another gently breeze failed to caress his face in his little bubble of not-quite-there-ness, he did notice it. A voice. A warm voice, one that forced the smile back to his face in spite of his best efforts to avoid it. He visibly relaxed, his shoulders slouching and the hand holding the pocketwatch dropping to his side. He depressed the button at its top once more, and closed his eyes. The voice was clearer now, though it spoke no words. It was more the essence of the voice he knew so well, babbling nonsensically on the periphery of his senses. He was used to this sensation; it was a sign that He was nearby. He must have been heading North this whole time, making the trip to rendezvous shorter for the both of them. Suddenly, his eyes flew open and he sprinted off on a tangent to his original path. The voice was crystal clear now, though still carried no words. He'd have to initiate contact to change that. Squeezing his pocketwatch relentlessly, he rounded a corner and stopped suddenly, peering down an alleyway.

<There you are!> He called out, the words seeming for all the world to die on his lips. No one in the area would be able to hear a thing he said in this particular manner - aside from his intended contact. For the one person in Lightbridge who could hear it though, his voice was light, yet full; a brilliant tenor, indicative of one well-trained in the vocal arts; the kind of warm, pleasant voice that seemed to always toe the line between speech and song. More importantly, it wasn't a voice that was heard by ears; it was a voice that would seem to spring up out of nowhere inside the listener's own mind - which, considering it held an almost-posh, almost-northern British accent, could be rather disconcerting to some. He schooled his face into a slightly less obvious grin, one with a little less teeth and a much more excusable mirth. <I'm going to bring you in to the silence, okay? Don't let me startle you.> His eyes found the familiar frame of the one he'd been seeking, a quiet young man who was just minding his own business, talking to his shadow and the like. He was coming up behind him, and until contact was made, even this chosen person wouldn't be able to discern his approach; for this reason, he made sure to do everything he could to avoid startling the young man. As he came within a few feet of him, he took a slightly awkward, wide step - taking utmost care not to to trod upon the young man's shadow.

Finally, he came up just behind the quiet young man's left shoulder, and reached out with his free right hand. Gently, slowly, with all the weight of a butterfly alighting upon a twig, he brushed his knuckles against the crest of the young man's shoulder, giving him the first indication of his presence. As soon as physical contact was made, even through this tiniest of gestures, the quiet young man he'd been seeking was suddenly brought into awareness of his presence. That much accomplished, he draped his arm across the other's shoulders, clapping his right upper arm in a most familiar way, and giving a light squeeze. Turning to meet his quiet friend's eyes, the dapper young lad flashed him a proper grin and tipped his chin in greeting, his silver eyes now making a go at outshining the moon.

"Oi, lad! How the hell are you doin' then?" He asked, his actual speaking voice audible only to the two of them, and identical to the voice he'd used to communicate upon approach. "Got some good news for me, I hope?"

Oedipus could feel something hit him real hard, probably the train, before entering the gate on the track. He felt a little lonely, a little despair, and a little happy during that odd moment when his body contacted the train and the gate.
I wonder how will other see my body or the woman just offered me help? Would our bodies be scattered into many huge parts? Or shredded into million pieces? Would people scream when they saw what happened? Or just stay there, doing their own business? Would people weep for my death? Or will they glad for I was gone?... Maybe this was the promise that the Girl promised me? Is death the only solution?... .

Thought circling in Oedipus mind, until he realizes he is probably still alive. Opening his eyes, Oedipus was filled with the light of the day. The green grass, gentle breeze, and blue sky with almost no cloud. Oedipus could felt himself started to let out a laugh. He is free from everything. Although there is a face that he didn’t prefer much, the cop, and he is looking at the attempted murderer. And with it, the blood thirst come back, urging him to kill, to cause pain and suffer, celebrating this special day.

His vision started to blur, his heart beat began to race, the adrenaline rushed to into blood. It was a wonderful experience for Oedipus to feel such thing happening, but not now. His breath starts to slow down and his vision started to regain its sharpness. It was a very addictive thing when you do it multiple times. Oedipus was soaked in the experience of losing and gaining, and it makes him happy.Then, a voice from the woman break out in his mind, shattering his odd experience. Oedipus was not surprise nor angry about the woman’s work, for the only thing that he could think of is this woman mad or stupid to joke with a serial killer.

Opening his eyes, with a curve line across his face, Oedipus approached the woman. His hand was closed, holding something that the Ghost Girl had given him. And on the other, the knife still bleeding red. Step by step, Oedipus approached the woman, with a smile on his face. Surely the police is looking for his action, but Oedipus didn't mind small details.
“Then, my lady.” Oedipus bowed to her before looking up. “What is your suggestion?"

Stormy

The oncoming train had been a falling star in the corner of her eye.

Tristan lay there still.

It was an odd sensation, knowing how you were going to die. You can come to terms with death itself, but knowing how, and when… it’s an unwelcome revelation. The Ghost Girl’s words did little in the way of comfort. Stormy’s lantern watched from the bench. The candle had sputtered out, now a cooling puddle of black wax. The station grew brighter. A girl was running towards them. Stormy looked down at her feet. They weren’t moving.

“Huh,” she tilted her head to the side, “I guess this is it then.”

She closed her eyes.

During her more youthful years Stormy had known a man that had rather haplessly fashioned himself as a poet, Howard, his name was. He was prone to diatribe and mournful ruminations. One thing he said that Stormy would have remembered, in that window after the train struck, if only she could, was this: “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents”. It was quite true; had she been able to recall the passage, her mind would have snapped easier than the driest of frail twigs.

So it came to be that a lazy breeze bumped into and over Stormy.

She opened her eyes.

Gradually, her senses would return. Above was an expansive pool of furtive blue, stretching from horizon to horizon to horizon. The sun chased idle clouds across the sky. She lay there watching for a time, a little stunned. Underneath her she felt the soft bed of grass, damp still from morning’s dew. It stretched off in a sea of shimmering emerald, with dirt brown surf breaking the waves as the path wound away out of sight.

A deep breath entered her lungs. A grin split her face. Tears brimmed at the corners of her eyes. She rubbed the earth with her hands, feeling the sodden clay and delicate blades, and then brought her grass-stained hands up to her face and inhaled again deeply. It was late-spring sweetness and loam eager to grow new life. She sighed, and stretched her branches, splaying her fingers and toes wide in the meadow.

What a joy it is to live.

Other voices cropped into life, and suddenly she noticed the figure silhouetted in the sunny day. The Ghost Girl’s painfully singular in her meagre and dispassionate way. Stormy nodded slowly to herself, lying there in the grass, only a little way from them. It was obvious she had just been privy to some rather powerful pixie magic, but it was far more charnel than had been expected; toadstool rings and waystones were more her speed.

Rolling onto her side, away from the kerfuffle, Stormy frowned as something dug into her hip. It was the gift, the deep-blue mask. Her hand snatched it up, and held it close to her chest as her gaze flitted to a flower. It was a dark and bold damsel, flecked with white-bright stars from the night sky.

“M’lady,” Stormy curtseyed as best she could, given she was lying on her side, “You are a looker, aren’t you just?” She reached forward, touching the petals, and then trailing her thumb and finger to its lower stem. “Excuse me.” And with that, she snipped the flower between two nails. “There.” She put the flower in her hair, by her right ear. “Now, we’ll see this new world together.” Stormy beamed.

Retching from somebody in the orbit of the main group drew Stormy’s dream-dazed attention. She saw a man, sitting, clutching his stomach. Rolling to her feet, she began to make her way over.

“How now, brown cow?” But as she sauntered closer, she saw the red puddle spreading at his knees. She closed the last few steps with uncharacteristic haste, mask in hand. She crouched at his side, but was careful not to touch him.

“There there Sugar, it’s alright,” she poured her words slow and soft and sweet, like crystal honey, “Just try to take deep breaths, it’s alright now darling.” It was then she noticed the tendrils of oily black smoke rising from him. She looked at the others, to each of the main group, still caught in posturing, to the brazen boy, to Tristan, and then, slowly, to the Ghost Girl, impassive as ever.

“Hey buttercup,” She called, waving a hand curtly at her from her crouching position, “Do you know what’s wrong with him? It’s not quite right that he’s got blood in his sick, y’know?”

"Tristan, what a good name," Ascot said, before he was distracted by Koda putting on his mask, and the aftereffects of that. He then whirled around at the Ghost Girl once the older man was done vomiting blood, walking away from Tristan as he did so. In a rage, the boy would shout at her:

"So the power comes at a price?!" The answer was apparently yes; Koda was the 'first to undergo the change'. Ascot glared at her in response, saying once more, "You are lucky Zoe isn't here." Power. Power to help people, power to bend to a purpose - the correct purpose, helping others. The boy wanted that, and so despite Koda's ordeal, he moved to put on his mask, his Semblance. As the mask, the gold-and-white half-mask clamped onto his face, Ascot shouted; "I want to be strong!"

A bright golden light glowed from the young man's body, illuminating the area. A simmer of white then washed over this golden glow, and when the brightness ceased, Ascot had been remade anew. His hair was now white as snow, his vest and shirt replaced by bluish-steel armor. His trousers were now blue, and made of a silken material that was nevertheless tough as steel, and he wore boots of leather with metal toe-caps. And finally, white wings unfurled themselves from the back of said armor, four of them, two large upper ones and two smaller lower ones. His eyes opened, then, and those were unchanged; they were still black.

This is so cool! Ascot thought, before smiling at the Ghost Girl and saying, "So, Silverbrook, The Magician, Unfettered. That is also where we can get food and water, correct, assuming we need it? Wait, do not answer that; we have to go soon."

He then flew over to Saffron, saying to the other teen, "Hey, Saffron, are you okay? I know this is a lot to take in - it is the same for me. But to be honest, I'd like the two of us to walk to Silverbrook together, the two of us leading the way." Ascot's wings literally fluttered as he hovered before Saffron. "Then, and I am really sorry for not telling you this back in my own world, but I have a crush on you - you are the most handsome person my age I've met! So...once we've defeated our first batch of monsters - assuming we were sent to Iriss to do something like that - want to go out on a date?"

Ascot's smile was now bright, and for a while, he would forget Zoe and her disappearance.

@Redward@MechonRaptor@Etranger@Ceta de Cloyes@Viatos

Everything was happening too fast. This is what it's like to see a dream from the outside, Tristan, thought. to be separated from the transitions, absent the instincts that hold it together.

Which wasn't true. Time flowed normally, moment to moment, as steady and sure as ever. Keahi's gun - is mine back home? Fuck, I wish I had a gun - gleamed in the light as the others spoke, laughed, confessed...the scene was surreal but perfectly linear, drawn from an extant history. He was the thing unbound. The earth felt soft beneath his feet and as he scuffed one the scent of the grass rose up from where he'd broken stalks, and breathing it in, something so solid and certain, made him feel like the beginning of a second disappearing act.

The truth is invariable.

"I am a variable."

Fuck. Was that out loud? Where did that -

The mask gleamed in his hand. Like a gun. He felt like he'd been standing still for a long time, but his breathing was getting faster, heavier. It wasn't that nothing was making sense. It was that sense was what he was afraid of. The weight of destiny. There's even a quest. The kid was dashing off, and then the kid was an angel. The killer was smiling in the sunlight. The Ghost Girl was still herself, measured, collected, even and attuned. Everything was right. Everything was wrong.

He needed an anchor, something that didn't stink of faith and fate. Something - someone - to trust. Tabitha, the harlequin? Laughing and crying with more emotion than he'd dreamed her capable of, watching from the shadows of their little band? He wanted to trust her, but wanting wasn't enough. The cop? For reasons that didn't make sense here. The killer? He didn't want to trust him, but maybe that, too, was based in reasoning that no longer applied. There was a girl shouting at both of them. Outside their dynamic. Stormy, too, and the vomiting man. Were outsiders safe?

What was safe? He felt a scream start to bubble up in the back of his throat, could almost hear it...

...but it wasn't entirely his scream. He could feel his Semblance against his fingers, almost but not quite trembling, somehow communicating this imperceptible perception through his fingertips. You were afraid, too. Had he really thought he'd go insane if he heard that scream? What had the Ghost Girl said? That they were alike, but she didn't scare so easy? But that wasn't true, was it? You were afraid all the time. No one to trust. But you found a way,
to move, to make things...

He gasped suddenly, a ragged sound like the tatters of a clothesline in a storm. Fingers scrabbling as his eyes darted, trying to keep the others all in view, stepping backwards, tripping, scrambling, the mask in his hands, the metal pressed against his face, breathing in sweat and oil, fumes and fear, breathing, shaking, screaming-

...safe.

His heart tore out of his torso, impaled on a spined tendril of carbon and silver. He stared up - he'd come to rest on his back, hands fisted in the grass - at the excised organ, uncomprehending. Then the tendril opened, blossomed as if in imitation of one of the field's many flowers, shredding and shedding its gorey bulb.
"N-" His new appendage reversed its path, slammed home into his chest, driving the breath from him. "T-"

A dozen more tendrils split his skin, discarding the detritus that defines a human being. Gears boiled up beneath muscles and churned them to ruin, their relentless rotations drawing out armor plates and sliding them into position, pistons priming and separating the chaff of his flesh wherever it interfered with their novel operations. Sprays of thick black ferrofluid warped and then retracted in midair, hardening into angular segments. Limbs, vitals, skeleton, musculature, the wailing indigenous vanishing beneath the conquest of clockwork and chrome. Soft circuitry, too, wormed its way through his mind, shocking him with its unbidden architecture even as the immediacy of his terror expanded - spreading out into its own subclusters, dedicated threat-calculating mechanisms that need not interfere with efficient action. A clockwork screaming, moment to moment, steady and sure as time.

Holograms of soft green light flared around him as he climbed to his feet, cycling through possibilities. Tristan dismissed them with an instinctive wave of his hand. A single tendril separated out from the back of his chassis, sunk into the soil to discharge a potentiality there. An emerald shard that set to shivering at a hungry frequency, wave-patterns like roots spreading across the ground to draw iron from his blood, calcium from his bones, pulses burrowing into the earth in search of richer veins than Tristan's former. After a moment the flow of materials coalesced and the shard unfurled into a delicate filigree flower, another set of holograms forming around it like petals, displaying future plans. At its heart a single offering gleamed, and with the hiss of steam lifted up into the air to meet Tristan's reaching hand.

Though it corresponded to no human design, there was nevertheless something immediately interpretable about the function of the device he held. A weapon. A gun.

Tristan examined it with too many eyes of molten gold as he stepped forward on mechanical legs, tilting his head briefly as the horns grew, four branching lengths of sharpened silver. He came to rest a few paces from where Tabitha sat laughing, but his unsettling golden gaze was fixated on their half-dead host.

"This isn't just...power. Is it?" One eye each flicked to Tabitha, Koda, Ascot, and for some reason Stormy, but the central orb stayed its course. "This was someone's. What was...she?"

He paused.

"And what are we?"

Listening to the quiet young man speak with his proper voice, safely within their bubble of silence, the taller young man finally felt himself relax somewhat. Just the slightest softening of his posture for the first time since he'd found himself forced to break into the cathedral. He let out a breath he wasn't even sure he'd been holding while he listened to his hooded acquaintance. His grin faltered ever so slightly, however, when the quiet young man mentioned that he'd acquired fourteen, just like they'd talked about. He accepted the plastic cards quietly, pushing them deep into an inner pocket within his coat. He wouldn't say a word about them, or inquire as to the nature of the recent Eufi and Dave. He understood, already.

"I was going to get some food, before meeting up with you. It's been a little while since we've sat down for a meal together. Gives us time to talk some things over. I don't think tonight is the right night to put things into action."

He allowed those last few words to hang in the air, feeling them reverberate in the spaces between the silence, spaces only his ears could hear. It was like the sound of the organ echoing throughout the Cathedral, undulating repetitions of the original sounds that folded upon themselves and wove a tapestry of discordant overtones - a true cacophony, but an effect he'd always found to be calming and grounding. His rêverie lasted but a moment before he took in a breath and answered in a more subdued, hushed tone than before.

"It's... interesting you should say that, actually," he began, pausing to glance over his shoulder in a rare display of nervousness. "It was to be my unhappy duty to inform you that tonight couldn't be the night, at all. I only have-..." This time, his voice cut off sharply, and he visibly stiffened. Far behind them, at the entrance to the alleyway, he heard the sound of trainers - footsteps upon the cement. It was a minuscule sound, barely perceptible to the ear, but the vibrations produced by those footsteps carried far enough to intersect the edge of his bubble of silence. The folding reverberations in the spaces between the silence produced in his ears a sound more like someone scuffing their shoes right next to him. He slowly lifted a single finger and pressed it to his slightly-parted lips, narrowing his eyes briefly at the quiet young man. <We have company... let me take this one. I'll explain after.> He nodded at the other before turning swiftly on his heel, his longcoat flourishing about him without a sound. At this point, his every move was silent, even unto his own ears.

He locked his gaze upon the corner of the alleyway, near the street he'd left just moments ago. The footsteps were getting closer, and something about them suggested that they weren't those of a simple passerby. They were slow, measured steps; he could tell by the rolling sound of leather and polyester against cement that each step was weighted toward the front. Whoever was approaching did so very carefully, on the tips of their toes. That's definitely someone sneaking around, he thought warily. Did I cock this up? Did someone actually hear me? He mentally kicked himself as the person slowly stepped into view. It was the student-looking guy he'd passed a little too close to earlier - the one who'd almost glanced back, as though he'd noticed him.

<Ah, putain!> he virtually shouted in the voice only he and his companion could hear. Realizing just how badly he'd slipped up, he felt a burning rush of heat colour his pale cheeks a sharp crimson as anger welled up within him. Being noticed by someone at all was bad enough, but to have been followed thereafter? It had never happened. Not once, in Lightbridge. He clenched his jaw, grinding his molars together in a terrible habit he'd developed in recent years as a stress response. His grip on his pocketwatch tightened as he raised it up before him, flicking the cover open to reveal the multi-faceted acrylic crystal window and the three hands ticking their lives away beneath. The window of the watch had fourteen individual facets; of them, thirteen seemed to glint even in the minimal light of the alleyway. One facet remained dull no matter the angle of the light striking it. The dapper young lad glanced down at that narrow, triangular glass edge briefly, and nodded to himself.

The student at the entrance to the alleyway was a tall young man in his early twenties - about the same age as the one he thought he was following. He was exceptionally tall and had an athlete's build. The weight of tumultuously mixed emotions was set upon his brow; uncertain scrutiny flirted with a kind of confused fear as his eyes danced around his surroundings on high alert. He took extremely slow steps, and stood in a defensive posture, arms up and knees bent slightly as he rounded the corner into the alleyway. The dapper young lad waited until he'd taken two full steps towards them before making his move.

He suddenly sprang forward, his feet propelling him up the alleyway noiselessly. He allowed the silence to linger behind him in his wake, keeping his quiet young companion in its grasp as he rushed the approaching student. The twenty-odd yards between them closed quickly. As the silence moved along with him, it pushed out before him, stretching out like the wretched claws of Death itself. Three seconds before he struck, the unfortunate student first became aware that something was wrong. He felt as though his ears suddenly needed to pop; a half-second later, he realized that the odd sensation was actually his apparently having suddenly gone deaf. He spun around wildly, his heart pounding - an incredibly unsettling sensation when felt in one's ears, but not heard. He raked wild eyes around the alley, the street, the nearby buildings. He could feel the spectre of his final breath approaching. He just didn't know how to identify that feeling.

The dapper young lad took the final sprinting stride and skidded to a halt mere inches from the still-unaware student. He was so close that as he exhaled, his next exhalation warmed the back of the taller man's neck. To him, the next few seconds seemed to go by with all the haste of a stone making its way up a hill. His soon-to-be-victim bristled at the sensation of breath upon his nape, hunching his shoulders and whirling around so quickly that he stumbled. He took in a sharp, soundless gasp of air as he lost his footing, and finally saw the dapper young lad he thought he'd noticed before. He only saw him for a fraction of a second, though. As his centre of gravity shifted and he began to fall back, his vision was obscured by the attacker's palm. The black-coated lad's fingers dug into the student's temples, cheekbones, and hairline, gripping tight enough to cause a flare of pain, as well as hold him awkwardly upright, unable to fall or to regain his footing. If he'd had a second more, perhaps he could have steadied himself. Instead, the shorter yet somehow so very much stronger young man depressed the dial atop his pocketwatch and held it down; the effect of this simple action was swift, and severe.

The student's entire musculature contracted in a massive seizure, his jaw flying open in a gut-wrenching screech that would never be heard by anyone - not even himself. Beneath his captor's thin, graceful, yet powerful grip, his skull was buzzing, vibrating at such a high frequency that human ears couldn't have picked it up even outside the silence. In that split second, every atom that made up his head had been forced to vibrate at frequencies exponentially higher than nature ever intended. The molecular bonds that made up the cells of his pia mater began to degrade as hypersonic waves pulsed out of the dapper young hand. In essence, his head itself had shifted quantum states, each subatomic particle being vibrated across the quantum spectrum from singular particles into wave-forms. The only particles known to exist that exhibit both particle and wave-form states were photons - light itself. No solid matter could withstand such a feat.

The dapper young man closed his eyes, feeling the undertones to the vibrational matrix he'd just set up in the space around his victim's head. He let out half a breath, relaxing the deluge a fraction of a second after it had begun. A tiny spasm tickled the outer edge of his left eyebrow as he focused on the undertones, using them to guide the vertices of the three-dimensional field of hypersonic, changing its shape. His pocketwatch audibly ticked the first full second since he'd breathed on the back of the hapless student's neck. That normally tiny sound was deafening in the spaces between the silence. As that tick reverberated around him, through him, he took in a sharp breath. The shape of the sound waves coalesced, finally; he'd targeted the vertices of the virtual polygon of sound waves to intersect with specific anatomical features - or at least, their general locations. The next tock of the pocketwatch smashed through the spaces between the silence as the student's pia mater was lacerated in a dozen places, the delicate membrane ripped apart by the intensity of its own atomic vibration; the same process ripped through several arteries, and turned the cerebellum and brain stem into a liquid mix of all the component matter that it used to be. The student stopped seizing as he hemorrhaged; he stopped breathing as his brain stem, the centre of the brain where the most basic bodily functions were kept going, liquified. He went limp in the young man's grasp as the third second ticked out of the watch, and it was over. He fell into a crumpled heap on the pavement below, dark rivulets of blood streaming from his ears and nostrils.

The dapper young lad let out a half-annoyed, half-satisfied huff as he dropped his arm to his side, opening and closing his hand. It would tingle for a few moments. As he turned around, he turned his gaze back upon the glinting surfaces of his pocketwatch, allowing himself a half-grin as the one dull facet joined the other thirteen in bright reflection of even the softest light source. He strode casually back over to his quiet young friend and held his pocketwatch up for the other to examine. As he spoke, neither his voice nor posture seemed to give any indication that he was in any way concerned by what had just transpired, or that he particularly cared about the corpse lying in a heap just within the boundaries of the silence.

"Well, with that done, it turns out I don't have to give you bad news tonight, mate," he quipped in light but restrained tones. "That makes fourteen apiece. However, this is my fifteenth corpse. We, erm... well, we certainly have some things to discuss over food. Did you have anything in particular in mind? My treat."