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

[cestrumnocturnum]

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.

Comments

[cestrumnocturnum]

There's something mournful, about the klaxon howling. Which might make it appropriate, for what she sees next.

As her wheels rattle over debris, observing a street that, once upon a time, was once packed with business people in their suits, their dresses, their Gucci and their Hugo Boss, a sight may or may not have her stop. Hanging from the streetlamps are thick black chords of rope, almost military in issue and make, but what hangs from them is more important. Men and women both, with grey to black skin, missing shoes, faded clothing -- perhaps five? Their ages impossible to tell.

She has an alien urge -- she wants to cut them down. It's entirely incongruous with what she is capable of doing but also very external, a dream-memory implanted like a seed in her heart with sudden mourning. There are words in black paint on the glass and brick behind them, difficult to make out, but they ultimately say:

the road to hell
paved with good
intentions

[bodilesswarrior]

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.

[cestrumnocturnum]

The rope splits when the batarang hits, because the power of belief, here, is just a little stronger than things like gravity and physics. Not enough so that the body doesn't fall, though, in display of these two elements; it hits the ground, folds over, lies like a broken doll. Four left, swaying gently like nothing ever happened.

Another one, is what Benji thinks. It's a glimmer of acknowledgment for Barbara's presence, and oh, she wouldn't talk to people she finds out here, not even ladies in wheelchairs who cut down corpses. Not normally. But she does, instead, a silhouette in Barbara's periphery that cuts through her alien compulsion to do the cutting at all, boots cracking on the rubble. She's in jeans, a coat, gloves.

"We left them--" ...is how she starts, shyly cutting herself off and sending a glance to the ghosts strung up by their necks. "We left them because we thought maybe they planted things in the ground. Mines, trip wires. Maybe we were wrong."