ph_logs | May Event - All Too Familiar

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event

May Event - All Too Familiar

Content Warnings: Walking dead, character deaths, potential for gore | Special Thanks to Meghan and Kalineh

It was a fine spring day when mysterious letters began cropping up all over Pumpkin Hollow. Letters whose apparent senders do not remember writing them, whose recipients or discoverers were harmed by reading them. Eventually these mysteries, though still unsolved, come to a quiet halt as stealthily as they began, but not before a mail carrier in a cowboy hat trots out to Elsie’s tree with a letter in hand, unmarked aside from being addressed to her.

She gleefully rips open that letter, hoping it's another message from her father. It isn't and, at first, she's crushed. But only until she starts to actually read it.

Elsie,

River la Croix has been hiding something in her forge for a while now. It is called the Book of the Dead. In its pages are hundreds of spells from across time and space with the power to give life to those no longer with us.

Your father is doing his best to revive your mother. But this island’s barrier is blocking his will, resisting his magic. I can no longer watch you suffer in solitude when a solution exists. All you have to do is decipher the text, and its powers are yours. Your mother will be returned to you.

River does not want to part with it. She will become suspicious of you if you ask, and it will become harder to acquire it. You will have to take it without her notice by levitating it out of her forge. She, like many others, is fearful of the Book’s power. This fear isn’t entirely unwarranted for them, but for you, your connection to the Feywilds’ magic will be enough to grant you access to that otherworldly power.

Good luck, and all my love to your dear mother when she returns.

Fond regards,
A friend

Could this be it? Could this be the miracle she's been waiting for? Hope swells painfully in her chest as she clutches the note close. She mustn't celebrate too early. She still needs to get the book. At least her mysterious friend has already told her where to find it. Her jaw sets in a look of determination, and she speeds away into the dusk.

It doesn't take long to reach the forge. River has defended it well, but Elsie slips into her own shadow and sneaks beneath the door without so much as a whisper of sound. Only her hand extends from the puddle of shadow on the floor inside, like a disembodied arm hovering before the flames. Mustering her will, she reaches out to the ancient book and commands the winds to lift it. Sweat beads her shadowy brow while she concentrates, the flames flicker and dance around the slowly levitating book. Just a little more, a little more… There!

It's heavy in her hand, and remarkably cool to the touch despite having been pulled from the fire. She retracts her arm and the book back into her shadow and slips out the way she came. Her heart thumps in her chest as she races back to the safety of her tree. To her mother, who will soon be able to wrap flesh and blood arms around her like she once did. All that's left now is to read. Her friends have been teaching her how. Her mother will be so proud of her.

Carefully now, she opens the book, feeling her skin crawl as a sudden unease grips her very core. No, she will not be deterred. The language is unlike any she's ever seen. The letters, if indeed they can be called that, feel jagged and painful to her mind. Still, she will Not Give Up. She screws her eyes shut, thinks of her mother, and holds tight to her desperate hope to be reunited.

When her eyes reopen to behold the page before her, understanding strikes like lightning. Suddenly, she knows she can speak the words. As they escape her mouth, an unknown magic swells into the space around her, then beyond her. The ground shakes. The air turns foul. And as the trinkets in Elsie’s tree chime together in the unsettling breeze, ringing out with notes more sour than usual, it quickly becomes clear that the advice she received was not from any friend.

The forms of people begin to pry themselves loose from the ground all over town, as if emerging from water, leaving the ground unbroken as they lift themselves out of the ground. They bear horrid injuries, shambling along grotesquely, telling a story of death. However, these are not skeletons from the graveyard, housing the souls of long-dead locals. These are things of flesh and blood, however exposed they might be, wearing newer faces.

Much newer.

Since the barrier went up, many people have died, only to have their bodies vanish and replaced by a new one. Those bodies now walk the town, seeking to unleash a wrath brought on by the corrupted magic of the Necronomicon. Anyone who has died inside the barrier will have a violent, undead copy of themself representing each death wandering the island looking to increase their ranks. Which means that there will be many, many, many Yoricks.

Destroyed copies will remain destroyed for the standard overnight period of any other person. But there are too many of them to defeat this way, and their destruction is impermanent. Thankfully, help is on the way!

In the midst of the undead and their attack on the citizens of Pumpkin Hollow, tiny glimmers of hope appear in the form of folded paper birds. The little gold birds flit from fighter to fighter, small whispers promising that if enough enemies can be felled then the High Priestess can intervene. The necessary number is unknown, but if a bird alights upon someone, they will feel their weariness vanish for a short time, and perhaps, should she feel like it, they may receive a temporary boon to use against the undead.

Eventually the High Priestess will show herself, making good on the promises of the little birds. With a smile, her magic will wrap around the remaining undead, returning them to the unseen graves and binding them into Death once more, leaving the living to pick up the pieces.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The older man passes a nod along to his younger counterpart, who finishes the train by nodding CT alongside him, like passing off something unwanted from one person to the next. Relenting, he says, "C'mon. Hurry up. You'll get lost without someone who knows where they're going. Better us than you."

The shape of the older man becomes smaller and smaller at their backs, a stout roundness set against white, as they march into darkness.

Inside, time slows. There are no light cues nor clocks hanging from walls to announce its passage, just the repetitive drip, drip, drip of water and uncertainty as to when you'll take your next breath of fresh air. He says things like 'around this bend', and 'a little further', like he's convincing himself he knows where he's going, when perhaps he does not.

Around the long bend; a little further.

He leads CT into a rickety lift. "The only way down to Fifth," he says, like that's at all comforting.

Pulleys and gears squeal in their labored descent.

"You an inspector-like? Or a police?" Squeal. Some ways away, muffled by rock slating, an explosion. It shakes their little mechanism. "We don't likes town. Always something going on. Safer down here, we thinks."

She can't help but imagine her Ma as they walk, all decked out in mining gear far below the standards of their day—they should have had better suits, helmets, filters, but money was tight and the operators were cheap.

In some ways it's comforting to picture her here with her, walking down the tunnels like she knows them as well as she did her own. In others it just hurts.

"Police. Technically," she answers, trying not to move even an inch in case it disrupts the lift. "Chief Inspector of the Department of Supernatural Affairs. Which makes the weird stuff in town my business."

And keeping people safe from it. Not that she's much equipped for that, not really.

"And none of our businesses, eh?" The young man nods, looking genuinely relieved by his own obliviousness. The lift rattles to a stop. They repeat this four times in silence, and eventually he lets her off and leads her down a tunnel— identical to the rest— where two men idle on wooden crates and argue about nothing.

"You stack four, two crossed, two on top, keep doing that 'til you run out and you light them that way."

"Who told you that?"

"Someone smarter than you."

"Fuck off."

CT's ever-helpful guide interrupts their conversation by clearing his throat. They turn sharp eyes on him and he shrinks back. At the furthest point of the tunnel, curtained by darkness, is a rhythmic ping, ping, ping and grunting of someone hard at work.

"Who's she?" One of the men, dark-skinned with a peppering of facial hair, probes CT with his eyes. His scuffed name tag reads 'Ahan', which makes the ox-like man next to him 'Bexley'. "Who the hell told you to come down here?"

The younger man calls upon a dirty rag from his belt and wrings it. "She's the police. She's looking for Osha. Something's happened in town." Then, in a rush, like he's kicking dirt over a fatal mistake, "But that's none of our businesses."

CT is so grateful that she has a good poker face.

"What he said. You don't have anything to worry about unless you head back into town, but Ripley's the only otherworlder who works out here and I couldn't get hold of her. So—" she gestures broadly, "here I am."

Stupid, and sentimental, and she could've just waited, she knows that logically she could've just waited until Ripley's hours were over and call her again when she should be on the train back down into town— but she couldn't be sure how far the horde had spread, or how far it might still spread, and apparently she can't stop herself being stupid and sentimental even when she knows that's what's happening, anymore.

The pair of senior men look at each other, deliberating the immediate and non-immediate consequences of pulling 'Ripley'— right, that is her name— from any given task. Arguing incessantly posed its own risks, and more often than not she would have tramped their already-eaten sandwiches under her boot. Today, they've seated themselves far enough to have escaped her wrath. Well, until now. The men can only hope, in an exchange of squinted eyes and amusement veiled thinly by dust, that she'll sink her claws into this woman as opposed to them.

Ping, ping. Hydraulics hiss.

Ahan clears his throat and bellows, "Hey! You've got someone down here lookin' for you!"

Ping, ping.

"Says she's the police! Says you're the only one up-top still kickin' around where you ain't supposed to!"

The noise stops. A voice at the end of the tunnel hollers back, "Oh, will you just fuck off already?!"

She hasn't picked up a single word.

Ahan rolls his head toward the narrow trail, grinning. "She's in there. Go on. And carefully, or you'll lose an eye. She don't like sneaks."

Seriously, poker face. CT bites the inside of her cheek and clears her throat, refusing to let herself be caught laughing at this workplace dynamic she's stumbled into. What reputation have you given yourself, Ellen?

"In my experience, that depends on the sneak," she says, cryptic as ever she is, before holding up a hand in wordless 'thanks' for bringing her this far and walking ahead.

In hindsight, she probably should've insisted on some sort of protective equipment of her own, but she's here now and just makes sure to be careful as she walks down toward where Ripley is apparently hard at work.

"Ripley?" she calls ahead, as she gets closer. "You're not going to totally blank out my voice too, are you?"

She does.

Sweat forms a heavy sheen across Ripley's forehead in her efforts to chip away sedimentary rock. A cloth bandana around her nose and mouth protects her, albeit poorly, from what dust she stirs about. She's found a hearty patch of coal right by her feet and it'll take a miracle to pull her away from it. The rock comes away under the force of her pick ax and hydraulic machine, which she uses interchangeably to punish the hundred-fifty centimeter-wide nook sprawled out in the floor.

She grunts. Throws the ax over her shoulder and lets its own weight carry it back down.

Hearing her name throws her out of an arduously earned focus. Her name, not her nickname (one she's determined not to care about, by the way), which is unusual for her cave-dwelling lot. So who...?

Ripley hisses sharply and tears her bandana down. "What is possibly the—"

She swivels her head, the lamp affixed to her hat bathing Connie in stark white light.

Connie.

Squints.

"Connie?"

Her slender face falls, first into shock, then into an odd, affectionate rage. She drops her pick and clears the space between them. "What the hell are you doing here? And— Jesus, why aren't you wearing anything?! You know how many mines they set off down here— how much debris can fall at any given time— you'll get yourself killed! Who let you come down here—"

She stops, feels herself tightly-wound, tries to relax. It's Connie, after all.

"What's going on?"

Despite everything about this day setting up to be the start of a nightmare, CT can't quite help the smile that pushes at her cheeks at the way Ripley instantly starts to fuss. Her name settles over her with an odd mix of warmth and lingering discomfort, like wearing an coat that doesn't quite fit right—still, the warmth is there, and she doesn't feel the need to shake it off almost violently the way she once did.

"I did try to call," she says, resting a hand on her hip. "And I didn't get the name of the guy that brought me down, but I get the feeling they'd be even less eager to lend me any gear than they were to let me come down here."

Still should've asked, though, she can't actually argue with that assertion. Her Ma would be turning in her grave, if she had the chance to be buried in one.

Her voice softens. "...everything's going to hell back in town. I couldn't let you wander in later without knowing."

Ripley falls silent, lips pursed like she's eaten something sour as she struggles to stave off the urge to march CT straight out of the mine before she's had the time to hear her out. She pulls off a glove, hand free to work her bandana's knot until that, too, is ripped clean. She presses it into Connie's hand.

"That's because they're a bunch of idiots who'd rather die down here with their stomachs full of beer and sandwiches than do a hard day's work. Put this on. You'll be coughing up black shit for the next week."

She can't will a real edge to her voice, no matter how hard she tries. Past the soot and sweat and damp curls plastered to her face, she's happy to see Connie safe from... Whatever's going on in town.

Ripley presses a hand to the small of CT's spine, leading her. "Come on, you can explain on the way up."

"And your lungs?" CT asks, even as she obliges and ties the bandana around her mouth and nose—no use in arguing with Ripley on this, she can already tell that much. There's only the one bandana between them. If she ever has to do this again, she supposes she'll have to bring her own. "Also, why do they call you Osha?"

She obliges, just the same, with the prompting of the hand on her lower back, no more eager to stay in the mine than she is to face the problem they'll be returning to.

She'll save the actual explanation for once they're really on the way up. Five layers worth of rickety lift travel will give them some time, if nothing else.

Ripley shares an exchange with the still-lingering trio of men at the tunnel's mouth. 'Do me a favor and put my things in my locker for me,' to the broad, pale, soot-covered Bexely on his crate. For the other men, her lethal glare and accusatory index finger. Ahan cups his hands over his mouth to jeer; 'Who ain't finishing a hard day's work now?', knowing full-well he'll pay for it later.

"My lungs are fine," she says, not exactly true but owning it anyway. Her thumb presses an even, authoritative pressure against CT's spine as they travel up, up, up.

"Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Osha. It's an Old American agency that got swallowed up. I'm sure you can guess why. Apparently, my aspirations to survive at my place of work means I've earned myself the title. I should have never mentioned it."

Onto the first lift.

She stands facing CT, hands resting on the rails to either side, craning into her space. Brown eyes shine intensely.

"Anyway— what's going on?"

Realisation flashes on her face. "Oh. Oh, I knew it sounded familiar but I couldn't place why. No wonder, that's old Earth history."

Replaced by other things, much of which didn't even extend out to the Outers—at least, not in practice. Regulations existing doesn't mean they get followed, especially not when corporate money is on the line.

"...you're probably right that you shouldn't told them," seeing as they've happily taken to using it as ammunition, "but I think it's charming that you did anyway. Very you."

Then, immediately into: "There's zombies crawling out of the ground. Seem to be the leftovers from deaths that have happened inside the barrier."

Ripley tchs her displeasure in her colleagues' absences. "Can't take it back now. I'd be surprised if half of them remember my actual name. Too much debris falls on your head and suddenly you go all stupid. I must be halfway there."

A system of pulleys guides their ascent from one makeshift floor to the next, to the next, to the next. Some are in better shape than others.

"Zombies," She can't find it within herself to laugh. Curls inwardly at the very real, very dead her that is likely staggering its way around town. Right, she never told her about that. How her run in with a giant, corvid-like beast had passed spores from him to her, and how she'd marched herself into the forest so as to not bother anyone else. She'd considered going home, dying there, but the thought of Wigglesworth coming up to greet her forced plans to change.

It was a painful, bizarre death. Floral scents still make her gag.

"About that..."

Something of a chill goes down CT's spine and she looks up at Ripley with a concerned wariness. "...Ellen Ripley, are you about to tell me there's a dead you out there?"

She thought she had a decent sense of how many of her ~~loved ones~~ friends had died since they arrived—Gaeta and Crichton at least once from the cult, like her, just for one. Ripley was not on that list. When the hell did that happen?

She catches her bottom lip between her teeth in a long, guilty silence.

"The flower people. In the newspaper. I was walking home from a shift, through town, and I heard someone calling for help. He was this— giant black bird that stood on two legs— and he was asking for someone. I couldn't leave him there to die all by himself. So I did what I could until he stopped breathing, and when I felt it coming on I walked straight into the woods. No way I was going to put anyone else in danger— spread any more of those spores. I was already contaminated. The right thing— the only thing to do was isolate."

A pause, guiltier than the first. "I didn't know how to bring it up. It's not exactly dinner conversation."

CT doesn't know whether she wants to kiss or shake her. Of course the coal dust and the bandana around her face rather answers half of that for her, but so does the rickety old lift, so in the end she just ends up grabbing Ripley's hand and squeezing tight.

"You could've called to let someone know," me know, she thinks but doesn't say, because it feels presumptive. This could've been at any point in the last few months and they only crossed whatever line it was they can be said to have crossed recently. And it's not like they've defined it (not like CT has left room for them to define it). "That's not a pleasant way to go."

The decision not to tell anyone seemed, at the time, infinitely easier to make than sequestering herself into the woods. The damage had already been done. Contamination was inevitable. Man's hubris is the efficient carrier of the world's deadliest ailments, and she refused to fall into that collective idiot's footsteps. In many ways, it was cathartic. A glimpse into her peers' fates, torn inside out by their very own contaminant. Easier to meld into the shape their collective faults take than to stand outside them, othered. Lonely.

Ripley envelopes her hand in long, gloved fingers and squeezes tight.

"No, not really. But I've seen worse." Hand in hand, she drags CT out from the lift and onto the ground floor. "The twenty-four hours after wasn't so bad. I just went home. Got a day off work. Can't ask for much more than that. I figured I should say something incase we see...it. I walked the path by the train station, not far from here. How many of them are there?"

A part of her wants to tell her she shouldn't be so casual about it, but then she'd be being a hypocrite of untold proportions—she's always brushed off her own death similarly, an inconvenience at most, a day she could still spend working without getting tired. Her brow still wrinkles with the thought of doing so, and she squeezes that hand back as they walk.

"Well, the barrier's been up for several years and there's been deadly events on the regular that entire time, so... a lot. Hundreds, at least." Probably more like thousands. "They're mostly concentrated around town, but I don't expect that to last. I avoided the actual woods on the way up."

Just hopped on the train and tried not to look outside until she made it up to the ridge.

"At least," She repeats, exasperated. An adjacent to 'fucking hell', though not nearly as colorful. "I don't suppose they're the kind of zombies that bite you to turn you into one? Like a disease? Or are they—" she gestures dumbly with her free hand, "—there for the sake of violence? The train should be safe. I can't imagine any of them would bother climbing aboard if there aren't any people around."

That is, unless said zombie (who may or may not be her) is accustomed to the train. Feels a subconscious pull toward it, like an animal to a makeshift bed. She hopes she's wrong.

Together they unearth themselves, a different kind of being rising from beneath dirt and stone. Ellen squints at the harsh afternoon light and makes a break for the train station. Listens closely for any unusual footsteps or inhuman groans, and hears nothing save for the distant squeal of locomotive wheels.

"So far, I've not heard anything about typical zombie infections. They're eager to kill, but it doesn't seem to be about transmission."

At least, besides creating new bodies that may rise again. Not enough time has passed to be sure about that, but she's sure it'll show soon enough. A lot of questions can only be answered the hard way, with something like this.

She sticks close to Ripley, hot on her heel and primed to pull out a knife if she needs to—not all that different from usual, in that way.

She breathes a heavy sigh of relief. "That's good, at least. We won't have to worry about mass infection. Fantastic." No, really, that's fantastic. She has a real thing for illnesses.

Beat, beat, beat of footsteps on the wooden train platform. All's clear so far. Typical for the station to be empty at this time of day, with the miners still busy at work. When the locomotive head comes rushing into view, then past, its cars are similarly empty. There isn't a single living soul out here.

A slow, squealing stop. The door yawns. Ripley leads her companion inside, muttering a 'watch your step'. They step.

Petals litter across the floor.

Heavy boots flatten petals with ease and without sound and for a moment (all it takes is a moment) CT does not register the splash of colour for what it is, before the door clamps shut and the train is on the move. One moment of failed vigilance, that's all it takes, before her brain catches up with her eyes and a spark straightens her spine.

That's not right.

Her head whips around and her hand flies to the sheath on her thigh.

It would be disingenuous to call the form at the farthest wall of the train a woman, or even a corpse. It is an ecosystem walking posthumously. Twists of Aspen branches break skin in their inquisition of bone and travel outward, upward, stiffening limbs into rods, capable of movement only by sparing the joints. On these branches are fruiting fungi, impossible to tell whether they, too, came as part of the change or if they affixed themselves after death had already taken place. These fungi travel in clusters across the collarbone, up the neck, obscuring half the deadened face.

From its mouth and scattered about the floor— as if the thing had been wandering aimlessly, looking for reprieve in the mundane, in the routine, clinging to what life it had lived previously but unable to conform properly to it— are little yellow Rue flowers. Leaves and stems hang from the still-open mouth. It is tall. Taller than its living counterpart across the train.

The air is acrid.

She can taste the budding memory in the back of her throat. Recollect with great clarity the strange, tickling feeling of little petals and leaves unearthing from somewhere inside her, and the stiffening of her limbs, which had come first. Each cough brought on new waves of pain, ribs no longer elastic but wood, stiff and unbending. If she had cut herself open, she might have found dirt.

Ripley hadn't done any studying of herself at the time. Merely rested against a tree in the forest and watched a bird— a shrike, maybe, or some other sharp-beaked creature— flit between the branches. She'd felt remarkably calm. Strange, considering how unruly the source of her contamination had been— the bird man whose head she'd petted, pleading until his final breath. Maybe he didn't know he'd come back. She did, and although the pain was great, she wasn't concerned. Simply waited.

When she woke as a ghost, she watched herself. Watched the fungus, the spores, whatever it was, take over her body and lift it from the ground. She watched it bend down in the face of animals— a deer, a fox, a large badger, with a kind of innocent observance— then turn away. That's when she parted ways. Headed home to sleep, or pretend to. The walk was long and the air was cool. Her bed welcomed her and she laid weightlessly upon it, idling in a way she'd never allowed herself.

Now, looking at the thing from this distance, catching the smallest traces of herself in fingers, patches of skin and bits of curls, she can't believe it's her under there. It seems laughable. Incomprehensible that a human body could do such a thing, and yet all evidence states otherwise.

It stands, unmoving, watching, for a very long time.

Ripley leans into CT's ear.

"We're going to take that thing down."

It's the first time CT's seen one of them up close.

They'd been collecting data on the Hanahliators, of course. Reports of encounters and symptoms and what to expect, the kind of thing they could pass on to the safety board to get out there to the public. Getting up close, though, that wasn't worth the risk even for her. People were already dying, they had all the first-person data they could need. So there was a distant to the horror of it, clinical reports of the progression a far cry from the slow, tortuous death it was in reality.

Now, there's little she can do but stare.

Bits and pieces of the woman beside her are mirrored between the sprigs of plant life and decay, one giving way to the other. Her stomach twists at the thought of it and the illogical, sentimental part of her wants very much to look at the real, living Ripley and remind herself that she is real and living. Not reduced to plant matter and fungi that can't be so much said to be wearing her skin but overtaking it.

The sensible part of her steels herself, curls her fingers around the hilt of her knife and nods at Ripley's words.

Aspen limbs creak with each step forward. Sheds petals and little tear-shaped leaves with the effort to move. For the most part, Ripley's dead other appears docile. Slow-moving, unthinking. It moves laboriously and lacks coordination, meaning stealth may very well be the way to—

A low hiss, like gas leaking from a tank. The jaw stutters. Elbow tucks in, fingers curl, and in a display of animal rage and frustration for its own hindered form, breaks the glass of the nearest window. Something black, like old sap, leaks from split knuckles. Angry. Hungry. Kill, kill, kill.

Step, step, step on long, long legs.

A moan. A rustling from inside. An angry, human eye curtained by fungus and curls.

In times like these, panic makes for a fantastic renewable resource. Energy easily bent and shaped into focus, if one knows how to work it between their hands.

"I'll play distraction," A hurried whisper. "You go in with the knife. You're smaller— you can duck behind and attack it from the back. It's dead, so it shouldn't transmit anything. We can get as close as we want."

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