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 laughs, neck bending compliantly as if the tugs are effective, matches the playfulness reflexively with a couple half-hearted attempts to nip the 'offending' hand. "It's okay, you're fun even when you're not being perfectly agreeable."

The blood fades away, the towel left red in its place. Clean-up to be done later. One more big communal laundry day to end the season, maybe; the town coming together to wash away the dead once more.

"We can't live that way, you're right. I think— we build up a tolerance, at least, to being on higher alert than the average person should be. God knows people did back home, with the war. You got used to it and went on with life or you crashed."

Not that the level to which she 'got used to it' come the program is... healthy, exactly, but at least it keeps her going. And at least around here there's more leeway. A life beyond the ever turning cogs of the program.

"Mm. It's not pretty, watching those people crash. There's only so much you can do for them, to hold them above water before they... You know. Lose themselves. Our navigator, she was like that. Prickly as ever. She'd let you know exactly how and when you pissed her off. We didn't get along very well, but her stress wasn't any different from ours. It wasn't until things got dire that she shut down. We practically had to drag her through the ship."

The towel sags, a soaked underwater-something now beached atop smooth ceramic. Her hands and face are cool where they've had yet to dry, and she's comforted by the assurance that she can now touch things without feeling as though she's contaminated them.

She sits for while, head thrown back against the tiled wall, hands in her lap. The respite is a cramped, blood-twinged and stuffy one, but a respite nonetheless, walled off from the chaos outside. Here, Ripley loosens perceptibly. Breathes slow breaths in and out through nostrils and feels sleep hook and pull her by the limbs. Thank you, she says at some point.

Lifting her head, "Do you have, uh, any coffee here?"

"Mm. Freelancer mostly selected against that type. Not just because we were already soldiers but because of who they chose to recruit."

Even then their careful psychological profiling them sometimes, mind you. The Triplets weren't what they'd hope they would be; they were skilled on paper but often struggled to match their best in action. But most of the time selecting for those caught up in the military courts selected for the types of people that could handle the pressure—or, at least, their response to it wasn't to simply shut down.

She tosses the towel aside onto the counter.

"You think a station full of cops makes it through any supernatural nonsense without coffee on hand?" she says, then jerks her head back over her shoulder. "Yeah, we've got a stockpile still."

"And how'd that turn out for them?"

Poorly, if she were to guess. Let it be a lesson for what happens when powerful men deliberately fertilized tension; allow it to grow and fester beneath glass while they observed from a not-so-safe distance.

"I should have seen that one coming," Ripley says, chuckling. It takes an honest effort to haul herself up from her makeshift seat. The only way she's able to do so is by throwing out her hands for CT to tug. "I'll have to keep myself busy, or else I'll hole up and finish the whole stock. If I do, feel free to kick me out."

(Glance, tilt, weight tossed from one leg to the other. Ellen's teeth sink into her bottom lip, creasing it like a cushion. The sum of her movements are like some strange thinking ritual.)

Adamant on not thinking too intensely, Ripley pecks CT on the lips and ambles for the door.

"Well, it did literally blow up in their face, so..."

Not so well, in the end. Even if it did take years to finally backfire. Even if the Director is still out there years later, hiding in the shadows.

She takes Ripley's hands and pulls her up, ready to step away to duck back through to the main office space— and then Ripley quickly bends, steals a kiss and scampers off. No, not even scampers, just slips away. It freezes her on the spot for a moment, face warm and mouth open.

(Overthinking, again, a dozen hundred thoughts flying through her mind about the situation she's tangled herself up within that she doesn't so much want to extricate herself from but understand, be able to see where the lines wrap themselves around them, follow them to a conclusion she knows what to do with.)

Then she snorts and bounds after her, "In the office? You'll cause a scandal."

"What are they gonna do, arrest me? Have you enforcers got some fantasy equivalent to handcuffs I should prepare for?" Ripley turns, trots backwards with hands raised in mock submission.

(Don't think about the details. Don't try to answer questions that have no answer. Let the numerical digits march on and on and on with no foreseeable end. Can't you do that? Can't you leave it, for once? Allow things to be simple?)

"So, where's this stash?"

She sniffs the air, bloodhound following a fresh scent trail.

"Fantasy equivalent?" CT laughs, taking a route that leads past her desk so she can pull out a pair of hefty and archaic but generally standard handcuffs from her drawer, dangling them from her fingers. "They haven't changed that much over the years, apparently."

Granted, in her time they're much studier and often powered, so these are far more archaic than even she's used to, but still.

She doesn't bother putting them down before leading over to the station's sort-of-kitchenette, mostly a surface, a small icebox and a detached hob powered by some magical source rather than a whole fireplace or stove to heat the kettle on. And, of course, the actual coffee supply.

"Here you go. Knock yourself out."

"Christ, look at those things," She marvels. "They're solid iron. Is this when you tell me there's a dungeon under this building, too? Somewhere to hook offenders to stone walls— all that Medieval torture shit?"

Were people actually doing that? The Old Histories are sort of up in the air; she couldn't tell you fact from myth.

Ripley putters into the kitchen, met by the warm, rich scent of coffee and the hope that maybe, now, she won't fall asleep the minute she sits down. Given the quality of last night's rest (that is, abysmal), she's exhausted, but not at all eager to close her eyes.

A mug is stolen, filled to the brim. She slides into a criss-cross on the floor.

"You joining, or do you have zombies to kill?"

"No dungeon. I think." She swings the cuffs around on her finger, luckily dexterous enough to keep them from flying off and breaking something when they land. "Just a totally normal jail."

She can't speak to whatever the constabulary did before the otherworlders all but took over, for all she knows they did have medieval torture shit, but she at least likes to think they're not running the place horribly now. The cop part of the job never has been her favourite.

She leans against the counter. "I can stay a little while, but I should get back out there at some point. We'll never reach whatever target we're aiming for if people don't keep at it."

"Mm, how boring."

Not that she'd want to be strung to a dirty stone wall. No, seriously, that sounds awful. Got anything a little less heavy? Less prone to rust? Rust isn't very sexy. Neither is tetanus.

"Yeah, you're right. I'll only keep you for a little." Ripley touches lips to mug, heat and caffeine a pleasant buzz at the back of her throat. "I saw more of those paper cranes, on my way here. You know, the ones from the sky? You think it means we're nearing the end of this thing?"

"What, do you want a dungeon?" she teases. "I'm sure something could be arranged but I'm also sure there's much more comfortable answers to fulfil that curiosity."

That edges up a little closer to the line of no longer safe to say around the office than she should probably let it, but it's out of her mouth now and she even emphasises it by catching the cuffs out of their spin. She tosses them back over toward her desk immediately after.

"It's probably a good sign, at least? They're responsible for letting people know what we're supposed to be doing, so I can only assume the more of them, the better."

"Not particularly," she insists into her coffee mug. "I'm partial to comfort, probably on account of— I thought you were concerned about causing a scandal?"

CT's flourish earns a 'very fancy' from the woman below her. One can always trust that a knife-wielder will make a tossable weapon of anything. The cuffs sail through the air to the effect of a canon ball. It's a miracle they don't buckle the legs of her chair.

"You look like you know what you're doing."

Another long sip of coffee.

"I hope so. Two days is an awfully long time to make a late entrance."

"What have I said that's scandalous?" She crosses her arms under her chest. "I'm just talking about our detention facilities."

The cheeky-playing-innocent smile on her face says otherwise, but that's her story and she's sticking to it. The rest can be left to the imagination, for now.

"I'm hoping we're either at the half-done mark or at least close. More than a few days of this and people are going to be exhausted."

"Oh, of course. My mind must have fallen into the gutter. Pretend I haven't said anything."

A stupid smile plasters onto Ripley's face. Whether it's derived from CT's cheekiness or a dozen new images of what the comfortable alternative to a dungeon looks like is anyone's guess.

"We can be sure it'll end, if what she's said is true. That's motivation enough to keep going. Without that, yeah... I don't think we would have lasted a week."

But it will end. It will. Best to remember that.

"We've got bullets to spare and a lot of fighters. So, fingers crossed." It'll end. Sooner rather than later, hopefully. Then it'll just be time to clean up the mess left after. Let the new dead revive. "If you're planning to stay here overnight, you'll have to take a spot at a desk or the floor. It's not exactly the height of comfort but it could be worse."

She's had worse sleeping arrangements in the field, at least, which probably gives her a skewed perspective and explains why the desk sleeping doesn't bother her much.

After this, they can get some proper sleep again. Hopefully. (Whether apart or together, she doesn't dare to think.)

"I'll try not to be outside too long, I definitely don't want to be out when it starts to get dark, but Crichton's been in and out so you might catch him while I'm gone."

"I'll...take my chances here, if you don't mind." She thumbs apprehensively against her mug's handle. "Check in on the little bastard at home once morning comes. But, I don't think I can sleep there again. Not until this is over."

Too dark, too tight. Placed squarely in one of the isle's busiest neighborhoods, yet the minute she drew the blinds she'd felt herself removed completely. Back in that uncertain, shifting place between dream and machine-induced stasis.

The floor is fine. More than fine.

"I'll keep my eye out for him. And— CT... Try not to die, okay?"

"I could never mind," comes out a touch softer than she strictly means it to, but she doesn't try to disguise it after the fact. "Feel free to raid my desk if you need anything from it when I'm out. I've got all sorts of things in there. Some books, probably."

(Likely overdue at the library, but she's sure Gaeta will forgive her that. She always brings things back eventually.)

"I promise I still won't take any unnecessary risks. If I haven't come back by sundown, then—" she makes a noise instead of finishing that sentence, shakes it off. "I'll be back by sundown at the latest. Promise."

"I'll definitely take you up on that."

The knot in her stomach, tight and bruising at the idea of nightfall, slackens a little. CT will be okay. There's an entire fleet of enforcers to back her up, a sun still high in the air. Whatever crawls over the horizon, they'll see it coming. In the meantime, she'll sit crooked in her desk chair with whatever title is stashed in its drawers. Succumb to half-sleep with cheek pressed to hard wood, waiting for a hand to shake her.

"If you haven't come back by sundown," Ellen starts, stubborn as all hell, "I'll come drag you back myself. It'll be my turn to wash you up."

CT laughs, a fond sound, and smiles a crooked smile. "Mm, that seems fair. I wouldn't expect anything less, really."

Stubborn as ever, but she wouldn't have Ellen any other way. This is who she is—who they are, even, whatever they're becoming—so that's how she wants her to be. (So long as she's not getting herself hurt.)

She crouches down to be on Ripley's level and considers her actions, for a moment. Brushes curls from her face, studies her for a moment, then—

Steals her mug, takes a swig, hands it back and stands back up. Keeping her on her toes, clearly.

"But I'll try not to make it necessary."

The hand in her hair arrests her. Draws perfectly sensible thoughts forward until they're crushed and forgotten against her forehead. The proximity leaves something to be desired (selfish), while at that same time encompasses everything she could possibly want; CT studying her like a computer lock.

Does she, in some reflexive way, prepare to be kissed? (Yes, she won't deny it.)

Does she expect her drink to be stolen instead? (No, not at all.)

(God, you idiot.)

Ripley laughs, all air and shock, like she's narrowly avoided tripping down the side of Crane's Ridge. "Asshole."

CT grins and winks at her, as she walks backwards out back to the bullpen. "Me? The picture of innocence? An asshole? I never."

(She'll make up for it later, probably.)

CT leaves and takes the warmth in the room with her. Looking down into her mug, her own face. Swirling and non-solid; a black coffee reflection easily broken by movement. Are you judging me? Yeah, actually. Go and make yourself useful.

A little more resentful than necessary, Ripley downs the rest of her cup and goes to make herself useful.

There is no seamless transition from day to night; no sunset pouring in through the windows. It squeezes between boards in paper-thin shafts, dissipating before it has the chance to pool. Without a clock to reference, it could have been that cold, dank evening forever. Creeping in as tendrils to snuff out the lamps, their last semblance of 'day' gone, like that.

Ripley does watch the clock between tasks (why wouldn't she?), and those who enter and exit through the Constabulary doors offer brief glimpses as to the time of day. At the first sign of sunset, and with no sign of CT, Ellen gathers her ax and prepares to take off.

Crichton stops her at the door. She isn't having it. Crichton, move. Met by, let's be smart about this, yeah?

I am being smart.

No, you're not.

Back and forward they go. Her, a stubborn nuisance. Him, gradually talking her down from the ledge. Her, limply setting her ax down. Him, patting her on the shoulder and smiling. Don't worry. She'll be back. Trust me.

More coffee. Completing tasks as they're given; some, alongside Crichton. Others, done by herself. She dreads not making herself useful; of burdening herself and others by freezing.

Evening comes. Lamps are snuffed, night patrols arranged. Those who had flocked out during the day make their scantly-constructed beds on the floor and prepare to sleep. Ripley is among them, sprawled out against her wishes on the floor beside CT's desk. She nods in and out of half-sleep, a book opened and lying on her chest.

It takes longer to make it back across town than it should have. With a gun in her hand it would've taken half the time, but the second the pistol went missing from her hip it made everything about this day more difficult. Hindsight says she should've made for the station the second she lost it, replaced the damn thing and got back out there properly armed, but she didn't do that, did she? She kept going with just the knives to her name and now it's turning dark.

But she makes it. Knocks a signal on the door so they can clear the barricade and let her in, then help them push it all back into place before leaning back against it and catching her breath.

No serious injury. Bruises and scrapes and blood that's definitely not her own, nothing more. The limited armour she has did its job and if nothing else she's used to avoiding taking hits in close quarters, even if the pistol would have been much preferred.

Gauntlets and chestplate removed, one by one. Outer layer shed so the blood can dry without getting everywhere. She drifts across the room toward her desk and stops at the edge of it, looking down at Ripley, half-asleep.

She exhales. "Hey."

Sleep ebbs forward and retreats. Swells against the blockade Ripley's set and makes only the slightest progress in passing through. She's conscious enough to recognize the squeal of door hinges. Not conscious enough to discern the number of footstep pairs entering the Constabulary. She feels the light weight on her chest but seems to have forgotten it's a book. Could be a hand. Could be that she's home, Tig having worked his way on top of her, her bed, harder than she remembers.

All this to say; she hears CT before she sees her. Feels her presence the way one knows they're being stared at without returning the look themselves. Ripley shifts. Squints through low light, struggling to crawl out from that half-conscious bog.

"CT—"

No, really, it's CT. She lifts herself on her elbows. The book flops onto its side. Alert brain and exhausted body wrestle with each other. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine," CT assures, holding her arms up to show the lack of injuries as best she can. She keeps her voice low, enough people around trying to sleep that it only seems polite. "See? I'm a bit sore but that's about it."

She circles around and crouches down, resting a hand on Ripley's leg. Exhaustion is settling in, but she's got some fumes left in her.

"I went further than I meant to and something stole my pistol, so getting back was harder than I'd have liked. Sorry."

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