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

[hehaseatenthepancake]

The urban ruin with its devastated skyline and blood-red skies is no stranger to Hellboy's mind. Sometimes it's New York, sometimes London or Singapore or any of a hundred other cities all around the world that he's traveled through over the years. Half the time, the reverie in which he sees these visions of What Might Come To Pass happens when he's at least ostensibly awake, albeit usually induced by circumstances that remind him of the destiny he's fought to deny. The one thing unusual about the dream this time, though, is that rather than Anung Un Rama, Great Beast of the Apocalypse, horned and crowned astride the seven-headed dragon Ogdru Jahad, Hellboy is merely himself, looking around cautiously as he wanders the streets.

When the first hellhound appears, green-eyed and on the prowl, it's almost a relief. "Okay, here we go," Hellboy says, mostly to himself. He doesn't know how he ended up in whichever city this is, but it was inevitable that something would come out to start some trouble. The hound's eyes turn red, and Hellboy sets himself and shouts, "Come on!" He doesn't have Excalibur, but his massive stone right hand serves well enough to catch the hound's charge short and send it flying back in a twisted heap of metal.

"BOOM!" He shouts, punctuating the force of his punch with satisfaction for how easily the robotic dog went down. Then three more pad out of the alley, with hints of metal glinting in the shadows suggesting that there are far more.

"...Crap." As tempting as it is to take on all comers, he knows that even he can be overwhelmed with sufficient numbers, and that sometimes it really is better to run. (He can thank Baba Yaga in particular for that hard-won lesson, and for just a moment he thinks he can hear her cackling in the distance.) He's not a terribly fast runner, but he's better than a guy his size might be expected to be, and he occasionally tosses a backfist with his right that sends the hound in the lead sprawling into the ones just behind it, opening up just a little bit more of a lead than he lost in taking the shot.

The chase takes them out into progressively larger streets with each turn, until Hellboy finally finds himself in blasted, wrecked Times Square, and what he sees pulls him up short and makes him think he might've had better luck with the robo-dogs. The square is host to a congregation of large, humanoid frog creatures. A small number in the middle are standing on a mound of human corpses, and holding up offal, skulls, and various other parts torn from the bodies at their feet as sacrifices. Many more surround them on the street, their hands outstretched, and extend long, tentacular tongues into the air. The tongues seem to glow a soft blue as they radiate out a cacophanous drone, while the frogs in the middle begin chanting prayers from a time long forgotten.

"Son of a..."

[cestrumnocturnum]

It's sort of a curse of her own power that Benji is limited in the department of true surreality. A stitched combination of dreams can make a patchwork quilt of incongruous images that border towards the strange, but true creativity of things she's only imagined never fully resolve into her mind's eye solid enough to manifest in dreams.

Meanwhile: chanting frog people.

She panics, a temporarily invisible presence in her own dreaming, centred in no one place but instead infused throughout the fibres of her own dreaming, although the frog creatures and Hellboy's own fearsome presence are alien and exotic to her, toxins in blood. She cannot simply rend them apart, she is not her mother, she is certainly not her mother's mentor, Hokuto.

Slowly, her own subconscious inks into the gruesome display. Corpses can be identified as objects, dead meat that's quickly spoiling, to be buried or burned or offered in ritual. To Benji, they take on faces. The pastor, the ex-FRONTLINE officer who had been her friend, her aunt, all long pale limbs and scraggled dark hair, and countless others who had passed unfairly and too soon, always-- just piled like a podium, homogeneous flesh, as if dug up from the Ferrymen graveyard simply to serve these creatures--

The protesting sentiment is not spoken with words, but Hellboy can probably feel it, a mournful disgust that tremors through the fabric of the dream, before the dreamer finds feet on which to move, almost mindless. Either brave against danger or simply ignorant, Benji suddenly darts forward, appearing from the shadows out the corner of Hellboy's eye - a skinny figure, dark haired and dark clothed, apparently unarmed.

[hehaseatenthepancake]

The faces that come into focus don't spark any recognition in Hellboy, but he's met and forgotten so many faces in his life that it doesn't surprise him either, doesn't jar him from being in the dream.

When Benji runs out, Hellboy is momentarily concerned that there's now a third threat, but no, there's no recognition there either; just some skinny kid. (He hasn't really gotten a good enough look yet to judge truly, but at his age he's inclined to consider a lot of folks kids.) Turning to face her, he looks quickly at the frogs to his left and the robot hounds to his right.

"Get down, kid!" he shouts at Benji as he runs in her direction. As he runs, he reaches down and draws his gun from its holster. His old gun -- a cannon of a revolver given to him by WWII superhero soldier the Torch of Liberty -- lost in the ocean years ago. Morgan Le Fay once commented on how much more natural he felt with a sword instead of a gun, but this gun is as much a reminder of an old, dead friend as it is a weapon.

The gun doesn't hold nearly enough bullets to take down a significant number of either group facing them, and he's always been a terrible shot anyway, but he fires what he's got into the central cluster of frog monsters anyway, figuring that he'll still hit something they don't want holes put in. Three shots in, and he reaches Benji, ready to interpose his bulk as a shield, herd her somewhere away from the fight, or do whatever else comes up as a better option.

Maybe they'll take each other out, he thinks to himself in a moment of rarely-rewarded optimism.

[cestrumnocturnum]

The command from Hellboy cuts through the irrational need to get to the bodies like a knife, a sudden dose of common sense that is about as ingrained as anything when it comes to living in a place like this. It manifests as Benji suddenly folding, hands smacking against the concrete as she does indeed get down, ducking as gunfire thunders, a spray of bullets tearing through the flesh of the alien creatures, knocking them off their perch to spill and join the bodies they were standing upon.

By the time Hellboy is reaching for her, she's agreeably on her feet again - no combatant, she is at least well-versed in the art of retreat and ducking for cover, and with only a briefly startled, wordless sound, she moves in tandem as Hellboy insinuates himself between herself and danger. Also moving with him on the retreat, even as his own self-- whatever he is, something powerful enough to backhand the hunterbots like they're made of tin, possibly it's a power, yes, probably-- is almost as alarming as the frog creatures.

The sight of something else halts her momentum, however, almost jumping back against Hellboy. Of the same make as the hunterbots, but a wildly different design - ten foot tall, the sentry robot is more equine, long necked, eyes already red as steam wisps around from the slats in its machinery and off its superheated metal flanks. It stands still and imposing (for some) down the way of the blasted 47th Street, suggesting that it is not designed for close combat.

Implying in turn that it is built for range, as the shapes of machine gun turrets settling into position are clearly visible even beneath a red sky. This may be good or bad, depending on how fast they can move.

Benji, meanwhile, has decided that Hellboy cannot be so bad, because she cries a rough sounding, "Run!" just in case he isn't capable of withstanding machine gun fire, and darts off at a different angle, wherever the shadows look safest.

[hehaseatenthepancake]

Getting them out from being squeezed between frogs and hounds runs his gun dry and requires him to punch a few more dogs before they're away. If he'd bothered to look back, he'd have been surprised to see that some of each group, lacking any other targets, had indeed set upon one another.

When the sentry shows up, Hellboy nearly jumps at the chance to take on one bigger foe instead of the many smaller ones they'd left behind. Then its machine guns pop up, catching him flat-footed in a moment's shock.

"Geez!"

The time that it takes for the turrets to spin up is just enough to jump to the side. Bullets fill the space he'd vacated an instant before, catching nothing but the tail of his coat. Hellboy's hooves dig into the pavement as he follows the direction that Benji had diverted to.

[cestrumnocturnum]

Are there alleyways, branching off from Times Square? If not, then the world readjusts into Benji's panicked understanding as she slips through one, desperate for cover. There's a diamond wire fence ahead that, catlike, Benji has already lunged at, partway up, before remembering who she's traveling with. The idea of Hellboy scaling a fence as flimsy as this one gives her pause, and deciding that she is not faster at climbing than he might be able to crash through it for himself, she hops back down to land, and turns to watch the carnage of one lot of subconscious monsters go up against the second.

"I'm sorry," she breathes out, not quite on the verge of panic. Her words come out stammered between uneven inhales and exhales. "I'm sorry, I didn't-- recognise those things, I just saw-- all of those bodies--"

The thunder of gunfire is huge, and she's only just heard thanks to proximity.

[hehaseatenthepancake]

Hellboy's knowledge of the streets of New York is only mildly better than tourist level, so he couldn't speak to the accuracy of an alley being here. Besides, he's rather distracted by not getting perforated, so he doesn't think twice about ducking into the alley either. He spots the fence, and rather than climbing or busting through, he rolls his running momentum into a crouch and then a jump practiced from years of leaping onto giant beasts in need of a beatdown. The crossbar at the top of the fence buckles under his weight as he grabs onto it, but it holds just enough for him to complete the vault.

Landing on the other side, he flattens back against one of the buildings lining the alley, attempting to reduce his otherwise considerable profile. "It's okay," he says, his gravelly voice tense as he looks around for any sign of trouble having followed them. "I understand. I've fought the frogs before. Thought they were all dead, actually. Name's Hellboy.

[cestrumnocturnum]

Impressive. Benji is quick to follow suit in her own way, the fence not completely crippled and in fact almost easier to climb, with the direction it's bent, and it whines as Benji's weight leaves it. She's still tense, shaky with the near brush of getting caught in the middle of monsters and saved by someone she might have classed as 'monster' herself, but the words help, and she sinks against the wall herself. The name is curious.

"Benji," she says. No one is allowed to be cynical about anyone's name, here.

She starts down the alleyway, preferring silence over swiftness in this case. "I've never even seen-- I mean, are they sick?" That seems like a polite, succinct way of saying 'are they the result of some freakish experiment we didn't learn about in time to stop' or otherwise.

[hehaseatenthepancake]

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?

[cestrumnocturnum]

"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.