ph_logs | May Event - All Too Familiar

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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

CT grits her teeth against the sudden rush of air and swirling debris—hardly dangerous, just an inconvenience, and yet it still makes her miss the days of full body armour. She shields herself from the worst of it with the bench, waiting for a moment to move—her duplicate won't last long, even in magical form it's a matter of seconds not minutes, but with Ripley doing her job it hopefully won't matter.

As soon as the mass of dead foliage lunges, she takes her chance. Leaps over the back of the bench, launches herself over the next two rows in one well-practised motion to land with a thunk in a gap between seats.

She flips her knife to reverse grip.

CT moves like a demon. A single rotation sets her knife's edge on the correct path of violence, ready to barrel down at the first opportunity. It's impressive. It's attractive. The kind of casual, tactical grace ordinary soldiers dream of. In her eye is a cold, lethal shine.

Ellen's admiring paired with a well-timed swing of the corpse's branch arm would have broken her nose had she not come to her senses. She ducks. Feels leafy tendrils graze her nape. Smells the incensed, exhaustive odor of fungus and death and feels sweat trickle down her forehead.

Too close. Focus.

It staggers against the force of its own swing, branch arm hitting the wall in an explosion of splintered wood, spongy bone and misplaced momentum.

The heavy thud of the impact jolts CT's spine and for a moment she fears what damage this thing could do if it throws its weight around too heavily as the train thunders along its track. Unlikely as the worst case scenarios might be, the sooner they end this, the better. There's no use taking chances.

One foot up onto the next bench, she studies the rear of it with quick, sharp eyes for a patch of sparser outgrowths—somewhere soft and fleshy enough to get the blade in, somewhere vital enough for it to count. The chest cavity is a mess and even the head is so thoroughly obscured, but there has to be an opening somewhere—the neck, all those delicate structures, so easily disrupted with the right movement.

(And, ideally, she'd like not to get too impaled in the process.)

Deep breath. She pushes up off the seat, onto the back of the next, and sends an illusion running out around its side to distract it further as she leaps for her opening.

There's an unrelenting thud and splitting of dry skin, like scoring leather, as CT wedges her knife into the human biome's neck. Blood and sap well through the cracks in large beads. Its ribs shutter. Weeded lungs push out still-human traces of air in a too-human wail, innocent confusion of something shot but not quite dead. Wondering in so few words, like it were conscious of who leaps upon its back, why? Why are you doing this to me?

It rears sideways, desperate to dislodge both CT and the knife, to trap her against itself and the wall, to crush her.

Fuck—

Ducked between seats, Ripley curses. Palms the ground for a glass shard knowing full-well that if she doesn't do something, CT might succumb to its weight in an awful cacophony of broken ribs and crushed spine. The impact of the creature's movements sends shockwaves through the floor, up her arms and into her elbows. There.

Glass in hand, she flings herself over the seat.

CT doesn't so much curse as she does grunt so harshly she may as well have, as her mind races with indistinct shit, shit, shit and she clings to her flailing perch with all the strength she can muster. Can't let go, let go and all she's done is lost the knife in the surrounding tissue and then they've got nothing.

She grits her teeth so hard it hurts and tries to drive the blade deeper, to move the blade within the body to cause as much new damage as possible, grip on the hilt pale-knuckled. Come on—

Knife's edge drives deeper, severing what remains of cervical muscle, nerves and semi-transparent skin. Delicate, fungal spines collapse around CT's closed fist. Deeper, deeper, blood, rot, secreting pain. Another wail, thin and insufficient. Deeper still— and soon she's driven her weapon so far that the hilt itself breaches skin and sinks.

Ripley clears a row on long, sloppy legs. Drives the glass shard into a bare, unoccupied space between ribs in what she hopes might be helpful. Supplementary. Enough to take this goddamn thing down before they reach the station. Its skin gives away with ease, blood spraying outward with a force that paints her uniform, making her shutter.

It shutters too. Attempts a brave step forward, human-branch fingers gripping onto frayed threads of life-in-death, before collapsing forward. Ripley yelps and throws herself out of the way. No chance she'll be caught under that thing; a carpet to soak up its black, rancid ooze.

Branches whistle on their way down, then settle.

She scrambles to stand.

"CT—"

CT lets herself fall. Lets go of the knife. Hits the floor of the carriage hard, shocks of pain at every point of impact but alive, away, not sent careening down atop the corpse roots and branches. Breathing hard, she pushes herself up to sitting and resists the urge to just lie there instead.

Her hand is covered in secretions and she shakes it sharply, disgusted, only succeeding in sending the stuff splattering against surfaces.

"I'm fine, I'm okay—" she reassures, even wincing as she is. Bruises, nothing more. She's had far worse.

A breath of relief (or maybe release, for there's no relief to be had), one she doesn't realize she's been holding until it's out. "Well, that was fun." Hundreds of these, Connie had said. At least. Ellen tries to imagine the spectacle and finds she cannot. What are they meant to do? Fight until their bodies give out? Nail boards to windows, barricade doors, and pray they'll hold? Corral the hoard off a cliff? Into the ocean?

Ripley plucks a rag from her work belt and passes it to CT. "Here. For the shit on your hands. I don't know what it is, but it can't be good." We'll find out if it's contagious, left unsaid. She can't bring herself to consider the outcome.

The train lurches to a stop, threatening Ripley's balance. She catches herself, curses. Throws out her hand to CT.

"Ready to bail?"

She mutters a 'thanks' as she wipes her hand as clean as she can, before reaching to tuck the rag back through Ripley's belt without really thinking about the motion at all. Then, she takes the offered hand and pulls herself up to her feet.

No use retrieving the knife. It's nothing special, nothing she can't replace, and there's another in her boot.

"Very much so."

The train door slides open and gives way to eerie silence. Ripley stands at its threshold, paralyzed. The platform sinks into itself, wood grain and brick obscuring. A trick of the eye. A kind of vertigo. Stepping onto the platform, away from the narrow safety of the train feels like stepping into a trap. From pond into ocean, where death is imminent.

It isn't the death that bothers her, not anymore. She'll come back.

It's ill-preparedness which coils in her stomach now. Turns courage into liquid; solid ground into a steep pitfall. At the crux of it— the heart of that terrible, coiled worm— worry on CT's behalf. She knows what she's doing. Doesn't mean she can't be scared. She's capable. More than anyone. True, but with what they're up against? If she dies, she'll come back. Impermanent as death is, a loss is still a loss.

She's holding them up. She should be moving.

Steeling herself, Ripley jumps onto the platform.

CT steps over that threshold with the adrenaline-fuelled urgency and focus that keeps you alive on a battlefield, and only the way that focus coalesces on Ripley keeps her from leaving before Ripley is at her heel.

"Come on," she reaches back to take and squeeze her hand once again. "Let's get you back to your place. Then I need to head to the station."

The path between here and there won't be totally clear but they should, she thinks, be able to make it without serious incident if they're careful. Most of the undead are little more than ordinary townsfolk.

She accepts the hand as an anchor; the pull she needs to get her moving and together they break into a grim trot.

My place. It isn't the comfort she'd like it to be. Ripley opens her mouth, closes it, tries again. Words feel precarious. Unnecessary air taking up space wherein they could be moving, breathing, making strides toward safety without laboring to speak.

"And when you get to the station, then what? What's really the plan here? If this goes on for more than a day—" You can't spend all night fighting. But 'can't' feels presumptuous, so she omits the latter half of the sentence entirely.

"The station is defensible. It should be safe enough to shelter inside when necessary. Plus, we have guns."

Barricade the entrances and carefully control movement in and out, that should be enough to keep the horde out and give any enforcers or stranded townsfolk a place to catch their breath. Add their weaponry and it's probably one of the safest places in town.

Stick to the shortcuts. As little time spent on the streets as possible, the better.

"There'll be some way to make sure this ends as soon as possible and it's part of my job to make sure we find out what and get it out there. And to keep people safe."

She can't argue with guns, nor the duty that comes with Connie's new job title, no matter how much she'd like to.

"Guns," spoken on expelled breath, disbelieving. Ripley shakes her head. "Brute force and waiting, is that all we've got?"

She doesn't mean to gripe, not really.

They slide between buildings, unnoticed. Creep past clusters of undead, to be dealt with later. Ripley bores a stare into the back of one's head, perplexed at the sight of it, made sick by it. She learns from observing, although her stomach protests. Some are more cognizant than others— high-level threats. Some speak, others don't. Most are unassuming. Mortal. Powerless. But not all.

She thinks of Valdis. Thinks of Fever. How many times have they fallen? Where do they prowl? And what chance do guns have of stopping them?

"And yourself? You'll keep yourself safe?"

"I'll try my best to," is all she can really promise without it feeling like a lie. There are no guarantees, right now, not with the unpredictability of which undead you may encounter at any given time. Against most, she stands good odds. Against others... not so much. "I have some limited armour back at the station, too. And I have my cuff—few of them seem smart enough to recognise a duplicate when they see one."

Too little of the mind left to see through the magic that can convince even the living. It's one trick she has up her sleeve.

"I know it's not ideal," she says, because it's the truth, as downplayed as it is. Not ideal, as if this isn't another nightmare scenario, like so many around here. "But until this ends, that's all we've got. And it will end."

God, she hopes it'll end and not just become a self-fuelling cycle.

A muscle twitches in her jaw, the smallest minutia of protest.

"If by tomorrow things haven't settled down, I'm coming to find you. I can make it to the station just fine, but I won't sit in my house waiting for it all to end. I'll drive myself crazy."

No comfort in being alone in times like this. No sleep to be had, save for the purely exhaustive kind. A forcible shutting-down of the body wherein the brain fights to stay awake. She could be useful. Do something.

An undead— tall, lanky, male— blocks the path ahead. An easy kill.

CT bends her leg at the knee and her body at the waist just enough to slip the knife from her boot, flipping it to the position and then sending it sailing through the air into the undead's skull. It hits, pierces with a sick crunch of bone and squelch of tissue, and the thing falls in a heap against the ground.

"Nothing I say is going to convince you otherwise, is it?"

"Not a chance."

It's like she's cut loose its marionette strings. One minute, standing. The next, a jellied pile of limbs and pierced skull. Ripley smells its stench from where she stands several yards away, leathery and sour. What she wouldn't do for sterile space air.

The ease of CT's maneuver turns her attention. She follows it through in reverse, eyes tracing the line from felled corpse to attacker, disgusted, admiring.

"Now you're just showing off."

"Maybe a little," CT admits, bobbing her head to the side. "I've had a lot of practice."

If there's ever a time for thrown blades, it's when none of their enemies are armoured—that was always the problem, back home (well, that and not wanting to lose her knives). No use retrieving this one, not anymore so than the last—it's a cheap thing with no significance, she'll either find it on the ground when the body disappears or buy more when the crisis is over. She's got plenty of others.

"Come on." She nods her head ahead again. "You have to promise me you'll at least wait the day. I don't want you getting hurt anymore than you want me getting hurt."

Ripley trots hurriedly after her. No way she's falling behind into the outstretched arms of some half-rotten thing. Dying once was plenty.

"Christ. We sound like politicians trying to come to a simple decision," spoken on a skewed grin. "Should we give dinner a go, too? We can argue about what we're in the mood for until we hit an epic standstill." Unless it's Max's breakfast. "But, yeah, okay. I promise. A day, that's all I'll concede to."

She reaches for CT's hand, unthinking, as they weave between residential buildings. The area bustles with zombie foot traffic. Better keep to the alleys. And quietly.

She sticks close.

There's the tug of a smile of her own at the mundanity of the thought of arguing back and forth over something so simple as the evening's meal. The concession, however slight, is appreciated, and CT doesn't protest the holding of her hand, curling her fingers back around Ripley's with little but reflex of her own.

Through alleyways and sidestreets. Past violence and quiet, roaming undead alike. By the time they're coming up on Ripley's street CT is already worrying about the sheer scale of what they're seeing, but she keeps that tamped down—one way or another, the situation will get sorted. She just hopes they manage before too many people (before Ripley) manage to get themselves hurt.

"...I'd keep the curtains closed and shove some furniture up against the door."

She dreads stepping up onto the porch for what it means— this sudden distance-induced lapse of awareness. Trapped in a space as opposed to seeking shelter in it, knowing only what's crammed inside four walls— that is to say, nothing. The sense of isolation turns breath into a valuable resource. Takes wide, empty living space and compresses it into an animal's pen.

Old wood protests being stepped upon. From the opposite side of the door, a cat's unhappy yowl.

"Got it."

Fuck.

Ripley turns on her heel. Catches her lip between teeth, gnaws. Time-waster. Do what you need to do.

"Please don't do anything stupid."

Goodbye feels too much like a bad omen.

"I won't be stupid." She can offer that much, even if she can't offer not to put herself in danger at all—there are levels of risk, and she's used to judging them. "Give Wigglesworth a scratch from me and I'll see you tomorrow."

Whether that's because the crisis has passed or because Ripley's made good on her threat to march across town to the station and sit in with her there.

She steps back. Pauses. Steps forward again and stretches to kiss Ripley's cheek before backing away once more to leave.

All of the usual affirmations; she'll be fine, she's perfectly capable, a soldier, used to this sort of thing, if she dies— which she won't— she'll come back.

Connie interrupts the thought-train (barreling half off its track) by pressing warm, full lips to her cheek. She steps away. Races down the porch and into action, unafraid.

"Yeah— tomorrow."

Fuck.

Ripley swings open the door, reeling like she's been punched in the face, and disappears inside.

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May Event - All Too Familiar

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