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]

"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.