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

[andyoullmissit]

"What?" she asks, regarding the earlier laugh. He doesn't look threatening but she of all people knows better than to be fooled by appearances. She's on edge, waiting.

[cestrumnocturnum]

The child doesn't say anything, wrinkling his freckled nose like he isn't sure he wants to bother. Instead, he gets to his feet, like a meerkat on a perch, instead he's some kid on the metal shell of a car, but before he can say anything, his attention snags to the right. Something more interesting than the strange woman he's found. His whole body goes stiff, a tharn rabbit who spied the hawk's shadow, before he promptly vanishes in a way that Clarice can recognise as a willing decision.

A split second after, machine gun fire thunders through the air, bullets burying in metal, pinging off it wildly, and there's no more glass left to smash or else that might have been wrecked to a fine sand too.

It comes from around a corner, just out of sight, if not for long. Ten foot tall with consideration to a long neck, atop of which is a silver skull, equine in shape, red light pouring from its silver sockets, and a tangle of glowing blue sensors drooping like vines where its lower jaw should be. Its body is massive, jagged metal like a ribcage, and walks on four legs that seem to taper like knives. And of course, the gun turrets, which halt when it realises its target has disappeared.

Sensors twist in the air, and it turns to regard Clarice.

[andyoullmissit]

"Oh fuck me," she murmurs, and blinks - higher and behind it, what she hopes is more or less out of range. Or out of range for long enough for her to draw a javelin, at lest. Even in a dream, she goes into fight or flight without hesitation.

A new sort of Sentinel? That seemed unlikely, but with dream logic, she doesn't question it.

[cestrumnocturnum]

[ Sorry dsjfhk, this went skidding off my radar during crazymonth. ]

"Don't."

It's sort of a gentle voice, with a gender that is honestly difficult to determine, if one cares for such things when trying to identify who spoke, considering it doesn't come from any particular direction. Benji hasn't really sneaked up on Clarice; she forms after she's spoken, standing at a different corner of the rooftop Blink has blinked herself upon, but in view of the robot.

She's a skinny kind of figure, but it's difficult to make out in the heavy, hand-me-down winter wool coat she wears, obscuring all else. Her hands, white as chalk and almost as brittle, rest on the edge of the rooftop. "You'll give yourself away, and it won't do anything to it."

[andyoullmissit]

It would be a bit hypocritical for Clarice, of all people, to object to others forming out of thin air; still, it wasn't what she'd expected and she tenses. "No? What is that thing?"