multiversallogs | 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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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.

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.

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.

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?

"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.

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

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