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]

But not quite.

The sound is minute, but up here, anything that isn't the wind rushing by or the general giant groans of these wrecked structures is probably noticeable by those keen enough to listen for it. It's sort of like a camera's shutter whir of machinery, but the actual impact of its feet are completely silenced, dulled with rubber and whatever suction function that makes it able to crawl up the side of a nearby piece of exposed iron. Insectile and less than a foot long in length, it remains at a distance from Bruce around the corner, some piece of its 'body' slickly turning until a red eye focuses on the shape he's made at the corner of the skeletal highrise.

One gets the sense, if one believes in that kind of thing, that one is being watched.

But just as immediate as this little robotic creation has come into view, there's the sudden crack of a handgun going off from within the eviscerated building, down a level. There's a twang as the bullet hits metal, but not the insectile robot it was probably aiming for. Unless it was aimed for Bruce, but then the gunman would be even more inept, although as it stands, it's a tricky angle to score.

The robot doesn't really react, in the way that machines. Don't.

[caballero]

Somewhere in between wondering why Enfys isn't with him if this is an offshoot of the Nexus and making sure his footing is still secure, Bruce comes to the conclusion that this isn't real. He can't remember how he got here, how he got into this particular getup, and the longer he stares down at the dark abyss of the ruined stories below him, the more the ash in the air begins to smell very specific.

He takes one step - gunshot - then another. Whomever is down there firing might catch a glimpse of his profile in the moonlight before he turns, heels over the edge of the beam, and lets himself fall backwards.

[cestrumnocturnum]

It's a startling sight, but not unfamiliar. This latter emotion only surfaces on a delay, however.

She sees down the length of the handgun she winds up twitching towards unfamiliar shape, and manages not to nudge the trigger when she sees him just drop. Feline-like, agile in a sort of hapless, nearly clumsy way, she finds herself on her stomach to peer over the edge of a glassless window a level below. There's a moment where-- the psychic strings that hold together the fabric of this dream might tighten and snag the stranger from certain death, time slowly like a film reel.

But the action itself, the will pressed down upon the world, snaps her out of, because she absolutely cannot save his life in the waking world. She's dreaming. The fish caught in the net has let itself free, so in the same split second moment, so is Bruce.

Above her, the camera robot whirs. With decidedly better aim, it's blown apart with a second shot, the echo clapping through an otherwise empty dreamscape.