[closed] → you were falling like the leaves.

[agrat]

Who: Wolfgang & Lea
What: Two members of the same cohort spot a man staggering down the street, toward a cliffside...
When: Veerdi, mid-late afternoon.
Where: Flag Hill
Notes: :)
Warnings: SEVERE BODY HORROR, creepiness.

There's really no reason she needs to be in Flag Hill, looking at that property. It's a steep price, even if her finances have been augmented by her savvy decision to sell off every piece of gold jewelry she'd worn upon arrival (sans that antique ring she's so attached to), and she doesn't need that much space.

She just wants it. So she bought it today, and is feeling--something, about the decision. Not happy, as there is no swing in her booted step while she walks toward the train stop, but she's not having buyer's remorse, either. It's just that purchasing property is a way of acknowledging that she is here, that this isn't some wishful-thinking elaborate hallucination she's dreamed up while in captivity, and she's not going anywhere. She is putting down roots, and a house is a way of putting them fairly deep in soil, to stretch the metaphor, she doesn't trust; this risks letting them get ripped out again, and that was a painful enough experience the first few times.

Lea swings her bag at her hip, appearing, for all the world, like she's paying very little mind to fellow pedestrians. This is inaccurate: she has the make and measure of every approaching person, guessing their species if at all possible, their height, their weight, how competent they are in a fight. She judges their walk and their clothes and whether they look at her, and some do more appreciatively than others, which adds incentive to her decision to ignore them, steadily. If someone approaches her or decides to get pushy, she is entirely on her own here, and she'll have to pick her fights with care. There's no sense in being overtly solicitous or nosy when she's so new here, particularly since she needs to establish her own reputation for not taking any attitude from anybody, and yet--

When she spots a red-haired young man staggering down the street a ways away, seemingly moving with purpose despite his haphazard steps, she's immediately concerned. The stranger has come from a tall, teetering Flag Hill house not far away, which Lea realizes only because he's left the front door open--not a sound mind's act in a city like this, or any city anywhere. She discreetly glances around to see if anyone else has noticed--or, more likely, to see if she's the only one who cares.

Comments

[gramarye]

He takes one look at those pulsing spirals and he's already walking out the door. No. It feels evil the same way those holes felt evil, and he's not going to touch it at all, the thought alone makes him feel sick.

Outside, Wolfgang leans against the wall of the adjacent building, which closed an hour ago. He won't touch the one they just exited. Later, he thinks, they'll have to come back and make sure it gets cleansed or something, any lingering spirits or presence removed from it, but that can wait; it is not, in itself, dangerous unless it lures another person in to take an object.

He is not sure how long they were in there, but he suspects it was much longer than it felt to them; the streetlamps have been lit. His hand stops glowing. He rubs it against his forehead as he looks down at the card.

"Well, that's easy. There's only one of these the city, and it's in Howl Barrow. Joyland." He's not sure if she'll have heard of it -- it is not actually a huge attraction (Baedal has no tourists and nobody here really goes on holiday in the usual sense, there's nowhere to go) because as far as theme parks go, it kind of sucks, and it's not something most people think to bring up. He's never been, but he knows people in the area, and... it's come up, yes.

"Hellsing usually takes care of that." The implication there is not that they should turn this over, because... if they weren't before they aren't going to now, it's that yes, there are dangerous things there, especially if the fog has rolled in.

So they're not looking at Disneyland, here.

"It's not long by train." But -- maybe taking a moment before plunging into what is likely to be the main event (these things come in threes; he'd know) is best. His hands are shaking, although the rest of him looks -- and sounds -- curiously calm. He is not calm. He's going to do this anyway because it's the right thing to do, but that doesn't make it easy.

It never does.

He tells himself he's seen worse, and he has, and he was younger too when it happened. But then -- there was always an escape. At any moment in the Deep Umbra, he could get away. In Baedal, he can't run; there's nowhere else to go except another part of the city, and he can be followed there. If he engages something he can't handle, he's just going to... not die, because he is nearly certain that day is not today, but death is not the worst thing that can happen. Not by far.

[agrat]

'Joyland' strikes Lea as a deceptive name. Her expression twists just slightly, subtly, and she inclines her head. They will take their moment, and then they will take this train to the amusement park, and she will fucking confront whatever is playing all of these games. It clearly wants them there, so they may as well bring this to its conclusion with full force. She has been delicate so far, but she's feeling a lot less inclined to play it cautious.

Still smarting from her startle earlier, no doubt. She doesn't like anyone getting the jump on her, even in a small way.

First, though, she wants to address this shop. Turning on her heel, she frowns up at the building, arms folded over her chest. "This thing is a time suck," she informs Wolfgang, "I don't know how or why, but it's just--subtly outside time. Still in reality, at least. I don't want anyone else getting in or out."

She crouches down in front of the door, which...attracts some attention from smirking passerby (maybe it's her skirt hemline), and she waits until they've gone before slowly rising, sliding her hands upward along the door's frame and the door itself. Concurrently, the metal and wood begin to knit together. When she reaches the top, the door is sealed at both sides, leaving the thin cracks at the top and bottom still open.

Lea rises, smoothing down the aforementioned skirt.

"Let's go," she says.

The train to Joyland is, as Wolfgang says, not a long one, as Howl Barrow's edge is not terribly far away. At the gate to Joyland, they can behold the empty ticket booths, the chained gate. Not that Lea is inclined to let a simple concept like 'trespassing' slow her down now, but she's a little bit surprised.

"Is it supposed to be closed...?" She looks at Wolfgang, uncertain.

[gramarye]

"The hours are a little erratic," he says. "I don't know if they were planning on being open tonight."

Were planning on, because if so, whatever they're chasing clearly had different plans. He's glad, though; no people around means no bystanders, and hopefully no deaths. (In his head, he thinks of it as "civilian casualties," as if he isn't also a civilian here.)

Wolfgang touches the padlock on the chain and it pops open. He is naturally inclined towards breaking locks, it's one of the more annoying side effects of his magic and is going to be a problem when his house is done and he keeps fucking up the front door, but for now it's useful. Unwrapping the chain from the gate, he leaves it -- with the lock, which he hopes he didn't break -- on the ground, pushing the gates open for them so they can enter.

Joyland at night in the dark is only marginally better than Joyland during the day. At night, the darkness clouds everything in dramatic shadow, giving even the most benign decorations a sinister edge -- but the darkness also mercifully hides much of the park's grunge, the little details like dead mice and questionable stains. That doesn't make it any easier to pass a giant clown's face, its gaping mouth the threshold to a ride, grinning down at them with manic soulless eyes, the paint on its face mostly chipped away enough to give it the appearance of melting.

"I don't feel anything," he says after a bit of initial exploring, keeping his voice down although he's certain whatever they're chasing already knows they're here. He starts to say that, anyway, because a few meters ahead of them there's the unmistakable sensation of movement out of the corner of his eye -- but he only feels it in his head, there's nothing really there, no figure darting away, just the feeling as if something just disappeared into a hall of mirrors.

Mirrors are dangerous in Baedal. How they've gotten away with having that many in one place for so long is anyone's guess.

"There." He takes a breath and heads in that direction, his left hand glowing again, this time not with a steady light but with the crackle of electricity, pulsing through his arteries and giving off just enough light that he can see by. Weaponless, all he has is magic, so he's improvising; if anything comes at them, he is going to punch it in the face with a fistful of lightning. That kind of consequence-free vulgar magic is possible in Baedal, which he's glad for. No one is taking any chances here.

He stops inside, startled at seeing themselves reflected dozens of times. But there's nobody else in any of the reflections -- not yet, at least. But something is in here with them, he knows that much, but...

It doesn't feel the same. It feels like what he sees every time he passes a graveyard here -- or lets his mind drift on the train home, opens his eyes to see someone sitting across from him that nobody else notices -- or watches as they pace in circles around one spot on a street ruined from the invasion, still ignored weeks later because no one really cares about Badside.

Frowning, he heads further inside, towards that presence, mindful of getting too close to the mirrors, but. Well, it's hard to tell reflection from reality. It's wrecking havoc on his nerves, because Wolfgang's ability to tell what is real is already...

A polite word would be "shaky."

[agrat]

Somewhat problematically, at least in Baedal, one of Lea's primary magical tools are mirrors. Call it a play on vanity (not actually one of her primary sins, but an easy mistake to make given her hyper-feminine presentation). As they progress through what seems to be an increasingly narrow mirrored corridor, she pauses at one of the mirrors, sensing something slightly awry with its face. With her reflection.

Lea leans forward just minutely and breathes on the surface of the mirror. Instead of momentarily fogging her reflection, its face ripples, as though it is water disrupted. While that is not, in and of itself, overtly ominous, it tells her that there is indeed some kind of magic here, perhaps old, perhaps new, and that it has been worked on these reflective surfaces.

She turns to call to Wolfgang, to warn him.

Unfortunately, before she can get a word out, something reaches out from the bottom of the mirror next and grasps her ankle.

"--Criss!" Lea fortunately twists away from its touch, but it's too late. Slowly each surface is disrupted as dozens and dozens of hands begin to extend from the mirrors, each filled with an identical fist attached to an identical arm, and the engineer's brain notices a symmetry to these hands' placement that is near-identical to the format of the many holes embedded on the cliff-side they saw earlier. There is a mathematic principle to this, and maths are of interest to her.

She backs up toward Wolfgang, wide-eyed, as the arms extend past the wrist in their reach, opening and closing, endlessly grasping.

[gramarye]

Wolfgang lets out a yelp, stepping back and then immediately forward again to prevent himself from just falling right into their grasp. They're in a pattern of some kind, that's all he notes before the more pressing problem captures his attention -- namely that the more they emerge from the mirrors, the more reach they have and the less room the two of them have to maneuver.

And the presence of those hundreds of hands, emerging more and more, makes it harder to tell which way is out, because they're obscuring the mirrors, reflecting themselves hundreds of times more. He looks around, starting to panic. They have to stand in the very center of the corridor to stay out of their grasp and he knows without having to touch them that if they drag them inside the mirrors with them, it is very unlikely either of them will come out again. He's just about to do something stupid like, say, shatter every mirror in here when he sees her.

He knows she's dead before he looks at her, like he knows she's the presence he's been looking for. She's about nine years old, blonde, blue-eyed, pale-skinned. She doesn't look a thing like Safiya, if anything she looks more like him, but looking at her barely corporeal shape is enough to bring back a surge of painful memories. She's standing about three meters ahead of them.

"This way!" she says, and turns and runs. He doesn't think before following her; she's not part of this game. And she's easy to follow in spite of the nature of this house, because she has no reflection in the mirrors. Unfortunately the two of them have the problem of being both much larger and much more corporeal than her, and he finds himself having to sidle sideways through those grasping hands, feeling fingers that are so hot they burn brushing against his shoulders, touching and yanking his hair.

She leads them through a winding path that is not the most direct route through the house of mirrors -- and also seems too long to be contained within the building, and he gets the sense that more time has passed than they are aware of, again -- until she stops at the room before the exit, a tiny plush room with a single antique mirror above an old-fashioned couch, and a door leading outside.

Wolfgang, who is well over six feet tall, crouches partially to steady himself but mostly to be on her eye level. "Thank you," he says, and... desperately hopes Lea can see her too and he doesn't look like a crazy person, talking to air.

"You shouldn't have come here," she says, gazing at her shoes -- one is untied. "The bad man will get you."

[agrat]

Lea has always liked kids. Even though her heart is pounding, adrenaline making her fingers twitch (she has a much stronger 'fight' reflex than a 'flight' one, she wanted to wreck that place, in her heart of hearts), she crouches down to the little ghost-girl's eye level too, tucking sweater sleeves over her fingertips. The memory of those--it must have been thousands, really--grasping hands won't leave her any time soon, and it's hard to resist glancing back.

"Not if we get him first," Lea says. "We've come to find him. What is your name?"

There is a hesitation. "Sabrina," she says, finally.

"I'm Lea, and this is Wolfgang," Lea tells her, indicating Wolfgang with a tip of her head. Seeing ghosts is always many things, often sad, but a little child ghost is the worst. She can guess, vaguely, how long this girl has been trapped here, but not whether her death precedes the activity they're following here. For all she knows, it could have been nesting in this city for centuries, waiting to make its move.

"I followed you," Sabrina admits. "Are you really looking for the bad man? He'll hurt you. He makes people hurt themselves and they--they get ugly. Like monsters."

[gramarye]

"What did he do to the other people?" Wolfgang asks. Ordinarily he would ease into this slower because he can tell she doesn't want to talk about it, but -- he can't shake the feeling that they don't have much time, especially now that they're in 'the bad man's' territory.

The little girl toes the ground, although nothing she appears to touch is disturbed. "He put the holes in and makes them go inside, and when they come back up, they look..." She looks away from them and shrugs. "And he put the people in the mirrors."

Wolfgang half-turns in the direction they just came from, reaching mentally -- but nothing's there. Either they're too far out of his range (he doubts it; he hasn't pushed his limits, but Baedal is not that big, even metaphysically speaking) or there's nothing left of their minds to hear.

"He came to the city a long time ago, but he wasn't nice like most people are. I don't know how come the gods brought him."

They might not have. He keeps that thought to himself. "They probably didn't know," he says instead, thinking she might rather believe that her gods made a mistake out of ignorance than out of malice or apathy, or that something trapped in here with them is cleverer or more powerful than they are.

Sabrina twists her braid around her hand. "He came to the park a long time ago and he made all the rides go bad. Everyone got scared and ran away. I couldn't find..." She trails off again, her hand pressing into her side like something there hurts her -- looking at it, he sees that it's a hole, as if something pierced her abdomen. He made all the rides go bad. Wolfgang can guess how she must have died.

"Now he's hiding and no one believes he's here anymore. No one listened to me." She turns her eyes towards them, like but you believe me, right?

Wolfgang glances at Lea. "We're listening."

[agrat]

Lea nods, her voice as reassuring as she can make it without dipping into 'patronizing' (being little doesn't mean Sabrina won't notice). She doesn't talk to her like a baby, and even though this place is worlds apart from home, it's hard to forget the faces of the children who stayed on the estate.

The ones no one knows about, the ones that could still be in the facility on Baffin Island. Or dead. Or worse.

"We saw someone he was hurting, but we didn't know it at the time, so we came here. We're going to do what we can to try to change something here. I promise."

Lea pauses.

"But we might need your help. Will you do that?"

Sabrina doesn't waste a lot of time in agreeing. "Yes." Something causes her to hesitate, though, as though she is remembering. "But I don't want to get into trouble..."

"In trouble with the bad man?"

"Uh-huh. This place is his house. He wants to make it bigger and I'm not supposed to get in the way, or else."

[gramarye]

He closes his eyes, listening again, but this time pushing his range outward. "There are people here," he says, slowly. "West of us, by... the ferris wheel. But something's... wrong with their minds. It feels twisted, like --"

He doesn't need to finish that. Furthermore, he knows there's nothing left there to rescue, that whatever this entity has done to them is permanent. That makes it simpler in a way, although not actually any easier. Mercy kills are never easy.

Or else. Something in him shifts -- sharpens. It's hard to tell outwardly, his demeanor is generally the same no matter what, but inwardly, there is cold anger. He's reining it in as best he can, but there's something a little unhinged in his voice.

"Do you know where the bad man is now?" he asks Sabrina.

"I can show you," she volunteers.

Wolfgang does not want to involve her that directly, he would rather have her stay somewhere they could throw a ward around to keep her safe, but the feeling he gets just from being here is that there is nowhere in the park safe from the entity. If they keep her with them, at least they'll be there to defend her if whatever this is decides to attack her.

He gets up and moves towards the exit door, looking outside, but there's nothing there but darkness and abandoned attractions, so he turns back to look at Lea again. "Can you shield her?" He sounds a little frustrated, because that's something he used to be able to do -- it's how he got his friends through the Gauntlet with him -- but he can't anymore.

[agrat]

Lea hesitates. It isn't that she doubts her ability, but she'd rather make a tower out of a cyclone of magic and put Sabrina in it, frankly, until they can resolve what is keeping her on this plane and not allowing her to pass on. Still, she can feel the range of this thing's crawling reach, the taste of sin still in her mouth, and she knows that Sabrina's means of death would still make her susceptible. It is a familiar principle among her people, her magical kind, indicating their shared ancient history with demons like the one they are chasing: you own what you kill. Death doesn't necessarily save you from the reach of faqra--that's just your body, a shell hiding what's really important.

"Tamam," she says, "Sabrina, I'm making a wall around you. Can you feel it?"

Sabrina squints for a second, and then her eyes widen. She's startled; she's dead, so it's been a long time since she's felt any physical sensation, but she raises her small hands and presses them against an invisible force (more visible astrally, but they're on one layer of the Other right now). "Uh huh. What is that...? Is it magic?"

"Yes. But it's very important you stay inside it." Sometimes little girls don't listen (Lea knows better than anyone, because she was exactly that kind of little girl, in some ways still is), so she makes sure Sabrina is looking at her when she says it. "Only you and I can step through that door."

Sabrina considers those words, and then nods, slowly.

"Good. Now, can you show us the way?"

[gramarye]

Sabrina nods and starts out the door.

Wolfgang hesitates only very briefly before following her. He stays close, not so close as to touch Lea's wall, but close enough that should something happen, he could physically block her. He stops once to pick up a pipe. He doubts whatever they're going up against has much in the way of a physical body to fight against, but its minions clearly do, if those hands were any indication.

It's quiet where Sabrina leads them, but no less eerie, all long shadows and lurking darkness. Joyside is not very inviting during the light of day; it's worse at night.

She leads them towards the ferris wheel, then stops near it. She points upwards, at the Joyland sign; the top of the ferris wheel is as close as anyone can get to it, there is no ladder. "He lives up there."

Wolfgang cranes his head upwards, but he sees nothing. That doesn't mean he's not there, just that Sabrina sees something neither of them can. He can feel it, anyway, a churning in his gut, like the closer he gets, the more nauseated, as well. He glances at the ferris wheel, the rickety old metal thing, with an incredibly dubious look on his face before glancing back at Lea. "Climb or ride?"

Gravity is a force. But tonight is not going to be his night to experiment with levitation.