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

[thewaythatiam]

It is not New York as Astrid remembers it when awake, but dreams are funny things that way. She doesn't question the destruction, or the differences. She stands in the shadow of a building across the street from where the Fringe Division building should've been.

It's been replaced. It's been replaced and she has no data on it and Lincoln and Charlie and Olivia were inside, they were all inside, they must've been because she was on her way to work, wasn't she?

She's not a field agent, she doesn't know what to do, and there's no one to give her direction. She tries to call Olivia anyway, and gets no signal. So she stays where she is, waiting for the right building to come back. It will come back. It has to come back.

[cestrumnocturnum]

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.