Library@Ruler Inc@Atrophy
It was absolutely freezing outside. Rien rubbed their hands together, but even the warm clothes they’d bundled up in and hand warmers they’d drawn were doing very little for them. They stuck near Kimberley and Jordan, though not right next to the two. They knew they were still on good terms with Kim but who knew with Jordan? They stuck to the middle, too. They’d quickly realised their abstraction would be useless out her – they weren’t exactly able to draw with gloves on and without them their fingers would freeze off.
“Creepy,” Rien muttered at all the carved up body, though they were desensitised to seeing dead people now. But still, this was a step beyond that. Hopefully they wouldn’t end up like all these people.
Tuyen swallowed the bile in her throat, averting her gaze from all of the dead. It didn’t get much better with each time. It didn’t help that she could never tell if they were real or a figment of her imagination created by her shadow.
Probably real, going by Rien commenting on them.
She honestly didn’t mind Rita practically clinging to her – it was comforting to have something that wasn’t her abstraction following her for once. And, well, she trusted Rita to have her back as much as she could. Hopefully there wouldn’t be any need for that.
Tuyen practically jumped at the distance cackle but quickly ignored it. It was far away, there were more pressing concerns – like the possibility of something being kept in the library. She agreed with Rita in the hope that it was just books.
“Even if it’s more than that, we still have to go in,” Tuyen pointed out, trying to sound less terrified of the prospect of
something being in there than she was. Her imagination was already going wild with what it could be, images of her thoughts flickering in the corner of her eyes and around her. She tried to ignore it. “We’ve melted the ice now anyway… better to go inside and deal with it if we have to, right?”
Town Hall@Ruler Inc@Atrophy@Ciaran
Caelea couldn’t say she was thrilled to be outside even if she understood that it was necessary. She walked in silence, mind still one what had happened before they left.
She’d heard Britney’s voice in her mind via some kind of wack telepathy. She really wasn’t sure if she liked that. Sure, Britney had said she couldn’t actually look into her head (which Caelea didn’t want at all). But that didn’t stop it from being weird and uncomfortable.
She assumed she fell under the category of being connected to Britney by hate rather than love.
Maybe she should’ve gone with the other group after that, since her and Britney could do the whole telepathy (not that Caelea had tried it). But she’d already made her mind up to go with Penny’s group and she wasn’t going to change it just off that. There would be plenty of connections between the groups anyway.
“Fucking hell,” Caelea muttered under her breath once they reached the town hall. There were bodies everywhere, even more clearly because of the contrast with the snow. It was like there had been a battle – or a massacre. Who knew. “And I thought this town was a shithole when I was a kid.”
Min remained silent, glancing over the bodies with a frown. He’d originally wanted to go with the same group as Tuyen – then changed his mind when Britney explained the telepathy. Tuyen was his cousin and they were close, after all, so he was sure he could contact her. Not that he’d tried it yet. He still hated Justin’s guts, but he knew that he had a useful abstraction and would make sure Tuyen was ok.
Penny was quick to come up with a plan for them to go in and, well, Caelea couldn’t find anything to disagree with about it.
“I’ll come up front with the two of you,” she offered to Penny, not expecting a refusal. She’d much rather be up there than at the back – and it made some sense with her abstraction anyway. “Just in case there’s any small spaces you can’t get into to check, yknow?”
While it was true that she was much shorter than Paige and Penny, she also just wanted to be up front (she doubted there’d be any small spaces).
AtomicEmperor,
Estylwen,
Silly,
Snowdrops,
Mixtape Ghost N,
NoriWasHere,
BlazingBark,
rabidbacon,
Sky Blue,
Framing A Moose
