fandomtownies | The Unexplored Wooded Area, Saturday

There was a special place here, that called to you: where the shadows were thin, though no less black.

Reno had been up late last night, researching logistics. There was, after all, a lot of work to be done before he and Iris could throw themselves back at Zack's Gaia, particularly if they wanted to keep Tseng off their tails for long enough for their little escapade to even do any good. There were systems that needed to be re-routed, there were daily habits and check-ins that had to be accounted for. And, hell, he knew Tseng probably listened to the radio here, so seeding some sort of failure to transmit to Gaia in a way subtle enough that it wouldn't be too suspicious was going to be important, too.

Up late.

And exhausted the next morning when he looked up from his work to see the sun rising. He should have slept.

But the outside was so inviting. Maybe he'd go for a walk first, as a... reward for all his hard work. The sun was warm, he'd never really had one growing up. And when he got to the woods, the trees were so inviting. He'd never really had those, either...

It started out simply enough. Astrid, on the roof of the dormitory, clutching her sketchbook. If she'd known about radio, she'd have listened to the broadcast, so the darkness that seemed to cling to the woods would have startled her so much. Now there was something to draw, there was a fascinating play on light and shadow that would give her a challenge to waste a whole afternoon on.

But she couldn't tear her eyes away from it. She realized that she was holding her breath, her knuckles tight around her sketchbook, and that was when she thought she heard it, just a faint whisper, it may have been just the wind, but she could have sword she heard her name. Her name, Aaaassstriiiid, soft and beckoning, in a very familiar voice, one she hadn't heard in far too long, her voice, Ingrid's, her mother's, and it seemed to be coming from those darkened woods.

But that was ridiculous. That was impossible. Just another symptom of her ever-growing madness. And yet, while Astrid firmly dismissed it all in her head as another hallucination, another trick of her mind, her feet had carried her away from the roof, down through the doors, outside into the afternoon and over to the forest, which was still, which was quiet.

See, she knew it was all in her head, there was no voice calling to her from within that strange shadows. It was all in her head...

...so why did she keep moving forward, until she slipped out of the brightness and into the embrace of the dark?

DJ Roomba had been tinkered with by Hardison off and on for several years now, so little things like 'roads' and 'grass' and 'woods' didn't stop it on its mission to vacuum everything in its path while playing great tunes. Hardison, coming out of the tent with a stretch and a yawn to see if Eliot had started cooking breakfast yet, turned to see the little guy barreling merrily towards the woods while Jaenelle Monae paid tribute to the color pink.

"Aww hell--naw, DJ Roomba, come back!"

He jogged after the little robot, trying to catch it before the creepifying shadows got ahold of it - only to get walk past it and into the trees. There was something in there, dragging his attention. DJ Roomba beeped pathetically where it was caught in tree roots, but Hardison never even looked down.

In seconds, he was swallowed up by the darkness.

Eliot had been fishing a ways down the bank of the lake, so he missed that little performance. All he knew was he came back with breakfast (which he planned to gut and behead and cook well before his partners could freak out about it) to find Hardison and his little robot friend missing.

“Dammit, Hardison!”

Obviously, Hardison had wandered off into the dark and creepy part of the woods. Where else could he have possibly ended up?

... Hopefully nowhere, because Eliot took one look at that wall of shadow and made a beeline for it without bothering to put any of his tracking skills to use. Soon enough he was swallowed whole, fishing pole, breakfast, and all.

"Hardison? ELIOT!" Parker came out of the tent to find both of them missing, and her skin prickled as she looked around. "Not funny, guys. Where are you? Are we playing a tracking game?"

Another ten minutes of looking, and they just. Weren't anywhere close. Weren't anywhere a little ways away, either. This camping trip had just taken a turn from a horror film, and not the funny kind with the buckets of fake blood and stupid dialogue. Parker heard a beeping sound, and followed it further into the shadows. "DJ Roomba, how did you get stuck there?" She picked him up and dusted off some loose leaves, then shivered as she put him back down, slowly turning around. DJ Roomba's beeps were getting steadily higher and faster, an electronic scream that abruptly cut off as her foot touched a shadow, and she disappeared.

Edited 2018-08-11 19:09 (UTC)

Steve, being Steve, had fully weighed the wisdom of Rosa's words on the radio, then left a note for Tony, "Off making sure everyone stays away from the woods, back soon--" and had headed for the woods himself.

The absolute stillness of the area, for a city boy, was one of the creepiest things he'd ever experienced. (Not "pulled his own skin off" levels of creepy, mind, but still pretty easily top ten.)

He took a few cautious steps forward...and disappeared inside.

Just enough light filters into the woods to allow you some measure of sight. To find a friend, perhaps.

Or just mill about helplessly, trying to avoid ghosts. You won't, but you can try.

Reno's senses had returned to him only once he was far enough into the woods that he couldn't find his way back out if he tried, and his brow creased as he looked around. The darkness didn't bother him. He'd grown up under the plate in Midgar, where the sun never shone and a city above managed to blot out any other light that might have otherwise made it to the city below.

A Midgar kid from under the plate couldn't afford to be afraid of the dark. Most of them never came to know it.

So he walked, trying to find a means of escape. Walked until he looked down, realizing that he was standing in a bed of brilliant yellow flowers growing up from bare patches of dirt. Just behind him, a trio of ShinRa security goons were yelling after him. Just ahead, a man with mako-blue eyes and a girl in pink were running away.

He frowned.

"Ah, hell."

Yesterday's torment had given in overnight into something new, eventually. After he'd tried, in vain, to push Gayle away, over and over and over again, after he'd noticed, after far too many times, the strange glow of the tube of lipstick that she'd had in her hand, touching up her lips as they made their way into the coatroom.

After, when it felt as though he couldn't possibly survive his body being torn apart one more time, couldn't possibly handle the guilt of hurting Gayle, whether or not it could have been helped, he could have sworn he heard it laughing at him.

He had been going absolutely mad. That had to be it. But one more wracking, mind-flaying disaster later and he'd had enough, had turned, not on Gayle, but on her lipstick, of all things. Had crushed it bodily against a tree trunk, and the visions left. The coatroom faded. Gayle disappeared.

His cell phone rang.

It rang again.

He pulled it out of his pocket and stared at it, hard.

It stopped ringing. There was a glow to it, the way the lipstick had been glowing before, and only a stone's throw away more shadows began to appear.

His hands were shaking, and for the first time in a long, long while, he was actually struggling not to puke. There were screams echoing inside of his head, psionic backlash from people inside. Robots on guard. And so help him, he could swear that the dish up above the camp had...

God, Leech... How the fuck did Weapon X get their hands on Leech!? Emma didn't... or someone? After Generation X disbanded? Anyone?

He froze in horror as his last moment of lucid thought supplied the name of this memory for him.

He wanted to sob, wanted to yell out in protest or beg for it to stop or to simply scream until it swallowed him whole. In a few hours, this whole nightmare would be empty, everything he was seeing would be gone, as though he wasn't there at all.

And then it would begin again.

Neverland.

Edited 2018-08-11 12:22 (UTC)

Hardison stumbled into the light, confused and clumsy after wandering through the dark. Shirtless, only in his boxers, he nearly tripped over a small, black iron Scotty dog, like the one his Nana had for keeping open the front door.

Then he got a better look at the thing, and realized it was his Nana's, it had the initials CH carved in shaky letters where one of his foster brothers had started to write his name, and the missing chunk of snout where Hardison had once wielded a poker to protect his Nana.

"So about that con," the little dog said, turning its head towards him with a creak of old metal. "You know where you almost got your foster mother killed? Let's talk about that."

Eliot took one look at a particular glowing teddy-bear and made a beeline for anywhere else.

And luckily -- or unluckily, once the reenactment got going -- stumbled right into his boyfriend.

"Hardison, thank god. What the hell, man?!"

"Whaddaya mean, 'what the hell'?" Hardison demanded, ignoring the ghost that was yelling about the time he accidentally tripped his foster sister Edie down the stairs and blamed it on the dog. "Be more specific!"

There was a lot going on in this clearing.

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OOC