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

[catiana]

The blast shocks her out of stunned terror, and her head jerks towards the source. She almost doesn't go, but she knows she's no use against these things, not without a form to steal.

So she runs, boots crashing down on the street, breath burning in her chest. The sentinel will fire any moment, she knows it will. Her body feels hot and raw, almost as if it already has.

[cestrumnocturnum]

Benji is running almost as soon as Tatiana is, disappearing through the other end of the side street in the barest glimpse of indication about where she should be running next. Above Tatiana's head, near her shoulder, brick and debris sprays as she is fired upon thunderously by the robot. By the time she's around the next corner, her arm is grabbed, and Benji pulls her backwards with a surprising sort of adrenalised, wiry strength.

They're both together swallowed by the doorway of the abandoned building, and Benji shoves closed the door. There are windows, but they are covered variously in slats of wood and taped plastic, where both the light of the outside and the air slithers through the openings.

"I've never seen one like that," is a whisper, but fills the room. They aren't out of danger yet, and Benji crouches so as not to be seen through the windows.