multiversallogs | you can't rely on bringing people downtown, you have to put them there.

Entry tags:

you can't rely on bringing people downtown, you have to put them there.

Who: Benji Ryans and You?
What: A transdimensional kidnapping might give anyone restless dreams.
Where: In your head. Or her head. Something like that.
When: Various nights through the week.
Notes: Please see the OOC post. Beneath the cut is a general idea of the setting in which you can tag in, but let me know if you'd like me to threadstart!
Warnings: Possible violence, depictions of ruined New York City.

Of those that know a traditional and contemporary Earth, maybe you can see the eroded shadow of a New York skyline which has had such a hard twenty-first century. The buildings are reduced to the skeletons of giants, ribcages and spines and skulls with gapped teeth. Yellow tape lies like dead snakes and dust covered from where it had once cordoned off areas but now it's all the same corrosive danger, every block this way to Harlem and back. It's war wrecked from the black crater radioactive heart that had cut out the soul of the city some thirty years ago and change, through to the slow decay of street terrorism and citizen warfare.

Night and day casts grey both and presents different dangers. The bright lights of a rebuilt and prospering Staten Island seems like an eternity away, and fences that once defined and regulated spaces have been torn apart, cut open, climbed over. Abandoned attempts at construction are like a graveyard for hope. Unbelievably, some people still live here. Some people even live in the tunnels beneath the pavement of the intact buildings boarded closed. Hazard symbols are spraypainted on the faces of buildings.

They come out at night, the robotic hellhounds that breathes steam out their ribcages, whose eyes turn red when they sense you are near. Needles in their mouths, sharp feet, klaxon howls, seven hundred pounds of steel, and artificial intelligence networked between them that sees herself as a pawn and a herd at the same time but carries out her coded marching orders because she lacks a name.

Tanks in the streets, but these are rarely abandoned. A wind howls through the once crowded city streets. The dream is vivid enough to taste ash in the air.

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As they sneak along, putting more distance between themselves and the fray, Hellboy draws his gun again, dumping the brass and loading in fresh rounds from a pouch on his belt with long-practiced motions. Benji's name causes the slightest fractional rise of one eyebrow for a moment (because sometimes he is something of an old fogey), but that's about it because, indeed, he is not really in a position to judge.

"Not as such," he says as he checks around a corner that the coast is clear before they move on. "The ones I fought, they used to be human, but they basically got turned into the spawn of an ancient horror from beyond the stars. There's nothing of the old them left to speak of."

But how did there get to be so many, he thinks to himself. He'd have been told if they'd popped back up again. Or maybe not. I mean, I have been away. That brings him up short, suddenly unsure of things. Haven't I?

Xas doesn't know where he is, and wouldn't know even if the place weren't a shadow of itself: the last time he was in New York City, it was 1823 and he was looking down at it from above. This is like nothing he's ever seen before. But it's swollen with its own emptiness, aggressively hopeless, and it tastes like burning. His mind, reaching for sense, supplies Hell.

On cue, someone wails in the dark.

Turning toward the source of the sound makes feathers rustle, brings wings into Xas's view, unexpected but not surprising. What does surprise him is that he can't stretch them out, can't beat them to lift himself off the crumbling pavement. When the wail is followed by a howl, Xas begins walking blindly in the opposite direction, panicking with an angel's instinctive, quiet dignity. The howl is as unfamiliar as the landscape.

Maybe Lucifer lost control of the demons. Maybe there was another rebellion. They might have destroyed Xas's garden - his centuries of work, the protective black glass dome and the careful irrigation.

His wings are nothing but fifty pounds of dead weight and air resistance, primary feathers dragging on the ground. Still, the instinct to go up is overwhelming, and with his mind still fixated on dead bees and shriveled roses, he finds himself standing beneath shell of a skyscraper. Even hindered, he can leap past the first story, landing ungracefully and precariously on a beam of warped steel, grasping for a handhold to keep from falling backwards again when he forgets to balance the unfamiliar weight at his back.

Shrieky climbs across into the boat with Benji's help, and carefully sits himself down into the body of the boat while she unties it and casts them off. He looks over his shoulder, once, to try and see if they're still being pursued, before turning his attention to the water. He dipped his fingers into it, then his whole hand, undeterred by the coldness. There were probably fish here. Maybe he could catch some for her, to say thank you for rescuing him...

The buzzing is loud enough to be all around them now, and Shrieky becomes aware of a tickling on the back of his neck. He reaches up to smack the insect away, only to find one crawling up the length of his arm. A few more buzz around them. Not enough to be making so loud a noise, but enough to set his teeth on edge. He shoots Benji an apologetic glance. For reasons he's not entirely certain of, he is certain that they're here because of him, rather than her.

Of course there is something bad on the other side. The rest of the world tends to qualify, and it pressing in around them like the dark is merely what keeps it at bay, but that just may be Benji's secondhand impression of this place. Painting it vivid, along with the texture of the flood, the dust in the air. It's almost a spell in itself, the powerful childhood belief that this hiding place could stop even the HIT Mark's rain of gunfire; it isn't even heard outside.

"Now..."

Benji supposes that that's a fair question, and one she can answer. She changes without actually changing, losing the urban, dust-tracked practically of wool, replaced with silk and cotton, ruching, stockings, shiny pumps, but as if this were a natural sort of transformation, settling comfortably into self-awareness. "You're from Baedal, aren't you?" she asks.

She isn't even sure if that word will mean anything to Wolfgang, but she doesn't like to snap people into instant lucidity; things can get dangerous for her that way. But the subconscious mind isn't always any better, either, considering the latest few moments.

"Baedal?"

It takes him too long to recognise the name, which is funny because not too long ago -- and how long has it been? He can't tell -- he was convinced that was where he is. His eyes have a slightly unfocused quality as he's looking vaguely at nothing just beyond her left shoulder. It feels like he should know, but then he's confused because that steam-powered creature and the presence of the HIT Mark read to him as Technocracy (Bad Suits, as he knows them) and they don't have a foothold in Baedal. He shouldn't have a presence there, either, then.

But he does. But this is.

But it isn't.

No, of course he's from Baedal. Of course this is Baedal, then it all makes sense -- danger and monsters and fighting. Right. That's where he is. The change in her attire seems utterly mundane, as if that, too, is just something that happens here. This has to be real because it's happening to him, and if you can't trust your eyes or your ears or how your lungs burn when you're running for your life, what can you trust? He already knows memory is a liar.

"Yes," he says, but he furrows his brow in confusion. "Aren't you?" Aren't we there? is the question unasked there.

(That he apparently doesn't find it odd that there are things like that creature from before in Baedal is telling and also rather worrying, even with allowance made for dream logic.)

Edited 2012-04-02 04:47 (UTC)

Her throat goes dry as her eyes fix on the swaying corpses. She's seen carnage before, but this...

She'll saw at the ropes, cut them all down -

She can't.

So she focuses on the words, inscribed as what she can only guess is a warning.

"Good intentions," she mutters, and her voice echoes oddly in the deserted street.

She bends down, intent pulling a throwing star from beneath her chair; it probably won't work, but she can try.

When she pulls her hand back, she's holding a batarang.

With a smile that aches, she aims at a rope.

The blast shocks her out of stunned terror, and her head jerks towards the source. She almost doesn't go, but she knows she's no use against these things, not without a form to steal.

So she runs, boots crashing down on the street, breath burning in her chest. The sentinel will fire any moment, she knows it will. Her body feels hot and raw, almost as if it already has.

Where she finds herself is what some may call the beginning.

It's not that Clarice isn't watching where she is going, but it's suddenness is just not detectable in dream logic. A glance behind her will show ruined concrete barricades that she'd merely crunched through, a warning of old of the first destruction to descend down upon Manhattan. But suddenly, all the same, she is confronted with a sight worse than simple urban decay and war ruin;

The blasted site of the crater, the nuclear heart of the Bomb that ignited so many years back, sweeping aside city scape, melting iron, turning concrete into dust, and salting the earth with radiation. The land abruptly starts to go downhill in front of her, cutting right into the earth, the subways, the gas pipes, all of it blended together in the same blurry mess of destruction.

In her peripheral hearing range, there's a sound. Boyish laughter, here and yet maybe not, but she can almost sense him, smell washed hair and laundered clothing, see dirty fingernails and red hair like a memory.

She is being watched.

Warmth tickles up her spine, and if that isn't enough to bring Astrid's attention around, then maybe the sudden spill of red light does.

Heat and light aren't the only things that fire gives off, though. Smoke will shake off a haze that smogs the open street, its stench as obvious as the way it makes eyes water. The sound, too, an engulfing roar that almost masks the breaking of the building its eating. The fire has only just begun, but it's reaching its peak; Astrid can still see the make of the two floored safehouse-- yes, safehouse, that's the word for it implanted into her mind as if she herself had always thought of it that way-- still standing even as fire begins to devour it from the inside out.

A door opens. A woman with black hair, her ethnicity disguised in ash, bursts out into the street, distraught, choking. She falls to her hands and knees, gets up, staggers.

A hand is what Xas' hand finds instead, but not for long.

Long fingered, conventionally mannish and sporting neat nails, an arm that extends from the shadows and makes sure the angel is not granted the indignity of falling back. That grasp transforms even before Xas can get a sense of who helped him, turning into steel jutting from concrete, like this is how it had always been.

Through the gutted interior of the skeletal skyscraper, a moment of someone that intrinsically owned the hand, but further away. They pause like a spotted predator before disappearing into the inner spine of the building, a blasted stairwell that creaks and moments beneath movement, but has enough concrete and iron to it to conceal as much as it supports.

The klaxon that Xas had heard continues to sound out. Maybe a little closer than before.

The girl's face remains too difficult to focus on, and Stephanie can't even check her pupils as a result; or rather, she can and perhaps does, but the memory of their condition will fail to hold. She does, however, see a tear through the cloth of her shirt, fresh spotted blood of small small wound, and upon further investigation, there's bruising and a single puncture mark, as if someone had been especially vicious with a needle.

She is still warm, breathing.

"They didn't save her."

Benji's voice slots into the room rather naturally. It doesn't matter, how and when she got here, she's just here, now, moving to kneel on the other side. "It's what happens, a bit, bad decisions. Or, I mean. Good ones, but hard decisions. People that get left behind." The electric lamp doesn't get set down, right away. Benji dangles it from her fingers to cast the light around a little.

Observing this unfamiliar place with a little bit of puzzled interest.

"Operative word being 'from', I suppose, but-- yes. I am, too."

Because they all are. America has immigrants too, so why shouldn't Baedal be the same way, even if Benji has only tasted it for a short while. She also doesn't miss it, Wolfgang's ideas of what Baedal can allow, and a hand drifts up to worry the pedant on her chain. The unasked portion of the question hangs between them like the dust in the air, and she nods a little. They might as well be.

Because if Baedal is not a sort of cluster of people's ideas and pasts and prejudices brought together to make something new, Benji isn't sure what is. "We can go somewhere else," she invites, after a hesitant moment. A hand goes back, hooking two fingers against the more rudimentary latch that levers the door open from the inside.

She has to put this one back where he belongs, but she may as well not throw him just anywhere, after what they've both just been through. "Anywhere you remember is nice."

Anywhere something isn't actively trying to kill them is an improvement. It's increasingly difficult to sort through his memories when so much of them are tainted by tragedy and danger and fear, though; bad things that can, will and have followed him from one place to the next such that even a transdimensional kidnapping is no relief. All his best memories share that same taint.

Most of them, he's not sure are real.

What he remembers is the beach. Hilton Beach in the height of summer; in July, it's 32°C, and the heat has a weight to it that drives people in droves towards the sea. The air smells like barbecue and the tang of sea foam, and tinny music wafts from stereos and pipes out of shops along the promenade, overshadowed in places by the joyous barking of dogs as they hurl themselves into the surf. The sunlight reflecting off the water hurts his eyes, but that he's dressed for the weather in Baedal in March appears to make no difference.

In high school his friends spent most of their time here. It's the most popular surfing destination in the city, in the country, really, and nobody cares if they hold each other's hands; no one says anything about any easy displays of affection, if they mean anything or not. No one calls them homos except each other and then it's just teasing.

It's all the normal teenager things he can remember without dragging something bad in with them -- it's the loitering at the mall, sneaking into gay bars along Dizengoff Street, pushing each other along the beach and into the water, smoking weed in the park at midnight when all the kids are gone, flirting without really meaning it, making fun of tourists. The faces of his friends are more like an amorphous blur, just like the crowds of people are present without actually being there, but even without picking out their facial features it's clear that they're happy and ignorant of the greater forces at work following them like a shadow, the ones he still feels like weights on his shoulders even while sleeping.

These are dreams he doesn't have, dreams about things that really happened when he was sleeping. Euphemisms make that sound more confusing than it is.

Edited 2012-04-02 20:37 (UTC)

That solves the mystery of whether or not the girl was drugged, and Steph keeps desperately wishing for a medical kit, but the dream doesn't seem to work like that so she does what little she can with what she has on hand. At least glad the girl isn't dead.

Her gaze snaps up at Benji's voice, watching her kneel down on the other side of the girl. The words manage to filter in despite her surprise, and her expression twists in a frown. She can't imagine leaving anyone behind, but she knows she can't judge others for doing it when she has no idea what their situation is like.

Steph suddenly feels too vulnerable and exposed, when she notices Benji looking around. No one should see this, not when she feels like she'll still find all the tools in the torture room covered in her blood.

"It's not safe here," is what she eventually answers. Because there's still those shadows that were following her and they can't be here if - when - he gets back.

She hasn't really been anywhere like this, herself, but has experienced it like this, from the white and blue beaches of Sicily to the chalk cliff faces in Sussex, England, looming over the bright ocean.

But this particular the beach, down to the last details weaving together out of the memories one can only find in their most subconscious moments, is Wolfgang's. Benji lingers a moment, her inappropriate footware sinking pleasantly into the soft sand and raising both her hands to shield the sun out of her eyes, head tilted, before she allows herself to disintegrate, to conform in the crash of briny seawater on the shore and the movements of the people that populate this man's memories.

She considers remaining like that, too, to bask a little in someone else's pleasant dream, but only does so long enough to make sure the setting holds. Then she will go away, like a slinking guilty shadow.

"Wait," Xas says in desperation, in his own language, and with meaning - the kind of meaning that could stop a hailstorm, once, that could melt glass and curve bullets. It makes his mouth flood with the taste of blood and his own effort, but it doesn't work

He spits pink foam onto the ground and moves toward the staircase, not letting go of his steel handhold until he can't reach it any longer. There are more holes than floor, mouths with jagged teeth, and he breaks glass under his bare feet as he moves around them. It takes him time to notice the glass is colored. It's green and brown, curved, and when he breathes in there's spoiled, acidic wine beneath the burning.

His throat clenches, and it stops any sound from escaping when he opens his mouth. For the better. He doesn't look down again and doesn't look back, and even though he shouldn't fit into a stairwell, he does.

"Safe isn't for this city," Benji agrees, dropping her gaze from the walls to the flame, then back on the woman who died in another life time and dimension. "The fences are too high, too sharp, and they'd take one look at us and know that we don't fit in where it's safe." When she talks without really thinking it through first, her natural habitat, her voice is almost whimsical in its patterns, melodic without music.

She ducks her head to blow on the candle, but gently, too gently to eliminate the flame; it just throws light and shadow around wildly. As reality shifts aside as if the room were made of silk curtains shifting in the wind, it pulls apart, Stephanie bearing witness to her own fears that keep pressing in, trying to get footholds in this particular dreamscape.

The room, the manacles, the drain, and even the shape of a man that on paper bears no resemblance to anything specific but still snags familiar at her consciousness. All of these dance between the shadows that flicker along with the candlelight.

"An ancient horror from beyond the stars," she repeats, and not because she thinks that that sounds crazy; it sounds interesting, if anything, as well as horrible. "The machines used to be people, as well. By which I mean. She was one person. She's the programming, not the rest of it." As is, no one was literally turned into such things, the steel, iron, hydraulics, and a vague gesture is supposed to communicate as such.

But Benji can sense a shift of mind and perception when it happens, even in something as imposing as Hellboy, and she glances up and alongside at him to try and pick what it is from his profile.

"Is something--"

But then something else, a horror; not from beyond the stars, simply beneath them, but it makes for a lot of space to work with all the same. It's a helicopter, glistening black, FRONTLINE printed in white, tearing low around the standing structure of a building down the street, with flood lights that pour white illumination down the street in a sudden shock. It appears from behind, Benji spinning to confront it but merely flinging up her hands in automatic defense, and beneath the sudden inundation of light, she appears to simply evaporate from Hellboy's side.

That's likely not what happens in real life, because it sure doesn't happen to Hellboy, who remains solid and standing. Soon, though, they will start shooting.

Steph's eyes dart around the room almost wildly, trying to make sense of the way the room changes and shifts with the flickering light. What Benji said sounds like lines from a poem or song, and it makes Steph wonder if the other woman is really here or if she's off in her own little world. She's scared, in a way she hasn't been for a long time and it pulls on her subconscious, almost making her forget that she isn't actually back there, waiting for Black Mask to return, her wrists broken and her suit sticky with blood.

"You--" don't understand, is what she wants to say, but it seems pointless to try to explain, there isn't enough time, "He's going to come back, we have to get out of here." It feels like she's begging, and in a way, she is. She just hopes that's enough to get them moving. She'd go on her own if she could, but Benji seems more familiar with this city, and there's still the injured girl to look after.

Edited 2012-04-06 09:39 (UTC)

The stairwell is dark save for where the night time and its strange light, infused with the moon and light pollution, fingers of illumination where pieces of the structure have fallen or been blasted away. Encouragingly enough, someone has been here before, earlier than even the shadow Xas had called out to. Youths with enough time on their hands to mark the cement walls inside;

7th ave
rip chinatown davids
??? - 2029
fuck the machine

And other such messages. The other tags on the wall are a little blurry, sort of forgotten, but this one remembered, and Xas may even have the compulsion to touch the felt tip commemoration on his way up.

There's a missing section by the time he's off the ground by three floors, but it's been patchworked over; sliding plants of wood wedged between the damage, steel pipes for extra hold. Trusting that everything holds up beneath the weight and balance of a person, one could crawl across to safety; the fall would mostly mean a painful clatter to the stairs below. On either side, the gutted interior of the building, accessible into the shadows with a leap. There are great gaping holes in the ground.

A new sound, now, the world condensing, stalking Xas. This time, rather than the sirens, it's a nearer echo of scraping metal, the creak of the stairwell as something heavy takes slow, methodical chase.

No one ever identifies the robots as any sort of gendered pronoun (and in truth, they happen to be female, if one considers the being that drives them), and so it must be something else. Something Benji doesn't know about, and she puzzles a look across at the other woman before obediently moving into action by pinching out the flame with quick fingertips. Hands emptied, she goes to pick up the arm of the injured woman, and she moves compliant, in expected ways-- her head bows, hair curtaining her face, but her legs work beneath her when Benji goes to stand to help her up, arm across her shoulders.

Steph will be on the other side, and they'll move. Ahead of them, predawn has made the sky grey. Were they always outside? The hard cement floor of the room of Steph's memory gives way to less steady rubble and dirt and urban broken ground, and a wind harshly cold from the morning smarts their faces.

The Hudson river is a stagnant, gunmetal grey thing ahead of them. The geography may not be so familiar to Stephanie, or else it might be an inconsistency, moving towards the coast of Brooklyn instead of in the midst of Manhattan's midtown. There are docks and warehouses, a ghost town, and across the river, there's Staten Island, which is no longer the quiet, boring little suburban town it once was in more contemporary times. Stephanie sees a city, one in progress of being built, something new.

"Who is 'he'?" Benji asks, fine steam hitting the air on the exhale.

Thank god, she thinks, although she almost expects something to leap out at them, but nothing does and she's soon standing and supporting the injured woman. The unsteady rubble is both reassuring and annoying, she's just glad that she's strong enough to easily support the woman's weight, and that Benji seems to be doing a good job of it as well.

The river, even changed as it is, helps her recognize exactly where they are and her brow creases in confusiom. How did she get to New York? And what the hell happened to the city? On the plus side, it seems to help dispell some of the intrusions from Steph's subconsciousness; Black Mask and her father should both be in Gotham, they can't get her here.

Her gaze snaps up to Benji at the question, almost surprised, "Black Mask. I can't- I can't let him get me again." It's hard to even say that much to a stranger, but she needs to explain why she's so scared, why it was so important that they get far away from that room.

"Ow."

She brushes a bee off her calf, remembering a memory that doesn't belong to her about an actress and her talents when it came to insect kind and the choking terror that came from the girl who remembered her-- it's complicated, a bit, how Benji's head works. But here it works to their benefit. A black bird with its bright orange beak suddenly descends, shooting like an arrow between mermaid and dreamwalker, taking out a bee before it can wander in its trajectory for Shrieky's face.

His certainty and the apology in his glance has Benji hesitating, some reassurance in the shake of her head. She feels like she should try to communicate without talking, too, because it seems polite, but instead she sort of awkwardly explains-- "My aunt."

The bird, apparently. Or birds. Despite the speed of the boat jetting for the castle's island, another one, a sparrow, darts in to snag another insect out of the air, although the one-by-one nature of the attack probably isn't going to help against a potential swarm... unless it's a flock.

There's always the danger of possible threat, but they seem to currently be alone. Benji is searching the river to see if any patrols are on the water, but there is nothing, no lights nor movement. One of the boats tied off must be one of the Ferry's, or else she wouldn't have come here, wouldn't have. Invented.

"Black Mask?" she queries, mouth working out of sync with common sense for a moment, but then immediately; "No, I understand, don't explain."

Everyone has demons.

And it's superstition, in real life, to imagine they might step out of the shadows just because their names are whispered, but rather a real danger when it comes to this place. There's a thrum of anxiety from Benji, one that reverberates through the fabric of the reality she and Steph have made together, and it's then that things start to become undone. The ground beneath their feet seems to flow by beneath their trudging steps out of proportion with the pace they've set. Ice cold water floods up Stephanie's ankles as the shore is suddenly there and her feet sink into loose earth, and Benji is gone so the injured woman they held between them suddenly twists to pitch downwards, legs fishtailed out beneath her.

Stephanie is dragged with, a sort of unstoppable force bending her, hands caught in the gravity of this fallen victim. But instead of finding the woman, or even the shallow of the river shore, her palms land upon soft earth, freshly churned. There are trees around, now. A wooden cross erected nearby, with dead flowers bound to its centre from long ago, longer than the dirt beneath her was dug into. There are other patches like this, in the clearing, in various states of age, grass growing in.

The morning is brighter. Nicer. There is no trace of the city, here, east coast woodlands surrounding, but the smell of nearby river lingers. "This was the first place I thought," would be Benji. She's seated on a curve of tree that seems to grow twisted and horizontal from the ground, and possibly more aware of herself, shedding the pragmatic fabrics of wool, pocketed coats, general shabbiness, in exchange for a white dress that clings and drapes from her lanky frame, as long as her ankles. She's adorned otherwise with just a pendant that hangs off her neck, almost a religious icon.

She nervously digs her bare heels against the soft grass. "We were rescuing a phantom, I didn't-- think it was very fair for you. You were trying so hard."

"What--?" She's not even sure when she starts to speak, sometime between the cold water around her ankles and the drag of gravity, but the sentence never gets finished, only get's followed with a confused, "Hey!" Crying out indignantly at whatever, whoever, is doing this.

As soon as her hands touch the ground she's up again, an almost painful alertness that shows in the tension of her shoulders and the way her arms rest in front of her body, ready to block or throw a punch. She looks around at the trees warily, expecting something to jump out at her - or she's looking for either of the women she'd been with seconds ago.

Benji's voice makes her jump, and Steph turns to face her, eyes wide but she listens to the explanation and relaxes just slightly, "You did this?"

She's not sure she understands; there's too many explanations for what this could be and sometimes she wishes her life were more simple. At least the shadows aren't stalking her anymore.

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you can't rely on bringing people downtown, you have to put them there.

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