The Unexplored Wooded Area, Sunday Morning

[fh_spareparts]

Shadows twined ever deeper into the forest, creating their own networks of darkness through a swath of grey.

The trees showed no sign of letting go.

[[ ocd up! ]]

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Outside the Woods

[fh_spareparts]

Come in closer, Fandom's finest...

Re: Outside the Woods

[snipsnspecks]

Ahsoka, no. Don't go to the woods. Don't run head-tilt towards the dangerous thing.

Sadly, Ahsoka was listening to the woods instead of her narrative and did exactly that.

Re: Outside the Woods

[era_two_triangle]

Peridot wasn't much for conversation...

Re: Outside the Woods

[2_old_for_this]

After guarding Hernando all night, Peter decided to take a better look at the darkness. Maybe from another angle, he could find out more.

He poked and prodded at a few places, before finding one that seemed...different. He put a hand up to it as he approached slowly...and it let him in.

Re: Outside the Woods

[thatsweirdright]

Jason was never great at following instructions.

So he'd gone poking around the woods early in the morning.

And then suddenly he was no longer around the woods, but in the woods.

Ooops.

Inside the Woods

[fh_spareparts]

... where the forest can ensnare you deeper, and anger roams between the trees.

Re: Inside the Woods

[furnaceface]

On Friday, Jono had railed againt his torment, had found it in him to up and destroy the glowing, taunting thing that had been making him live and re-live his failure to save Gayle. And of course he had. He and Gayle had made their peace years ago. She'd joined with Emplate to get her revenge against him. It had been horrible. It had ended with her sobbing on the forest floor with him wrapped around her protectively.

Some bloody tube of lipstick hadn't been able to take that peace away from him.

But this? What his old phone had exposed him to here? The clearing out of Neverland, over and over and over again?

There was no forgiveness for that.

He'd watched in sickened horror the first time, remembering all too keenly what it had been like to have his mind ripped away, remembering the cold precision of his actions after it had been.

Every sob for forgiveness, every plea for freedom, every mind as it blinked out into nothingness, the smell of the fire, the sight of the--

The second time, he'd tried to stop it, but there was no stopping the way he had moved all those years ago, with conviction. With purpose. Filthy muties. Just as theirs had been then, his powers were being restrained now. No fire. No telepathy. He couldn't even cry out to beg for it to stop.

The third time, he had joined his own victims in the camp, and got to live first-hand the horrors that he'd visited on them from their very own perspective.

The fourth time, something dark and ugly within him, something that breaking the conditioning hadn't completely rid him of, had informed him that he had only been doing his job.

Nothing personal.

The fifth time, he saw nothing, drawing ito his own head and trying to fight back the monster that he'd been when he'd done all of this.

The sixth time, he sat and stared.

The seventh time, he sat and stared.

The tenth time, he sat and stared.

The twentieth time, he sat and stared...

Re: Inside the Woods

[raspberryturk]

A reckoning? The woods wanted a reckoning, did it?

The Turks had a hell of a lot to answer for, was the thing. Since finding himself lost in the forest, in the darkness, he'd been tormented by everything from crushed flowers to the personal effects of people that he'd killed while doing the job. People that he'd forced into the service of ShinRa. People who he had erased from the collective consciousness of the world at large.

He'd handled it. He'd handled each one with quiet certainty. Those things weren't what he was about, now. They couldn't take the man that he'd become away from him. Everything that rose up against him fell, swiftly. He didn't need his Materia or even his speed to take any of it down. Why the hell would he?

He had this. He had all of it. There was very little, after all, that he regretted in his life. The bigger picture, maybe. The people he'd failed to save. The world he'd helped to obliterate. But how could anything torment him for that? Drop a meteor on his head? Take him to Edge, which he'd personally had a hand in rebuilding, which had come so far since Meteorfall that he couldn't help but be viciously proud of just how close it had grown to being a bustling city in its own right?

There was nothing the shadows could throw at him, until he'd rounded a corner and stepped out onto a familiar platform. He tensed, pulling his baton to hand. It was little more than a metal stick in here, but a metal stick was better than nothing.

Three faceless, glowing shapes stepped out on the platform in front of him. It was too late; the countdown had already begun. He'd hold them off until it was too late, and then he'd escape. That had been the plan.

How he had felt about it hadn't mattered.

He was a Turk.

He did the job.

Re: Inside the Woods

[snipsnspecks]

Ahsoka didn't notice it at first. Didn't notice much of anything, to be honest, her senses dulled and the world gone flat with the loss of the Force.

At least not until she tripped over it. And placed her hand on a tube of metal, with switches and buttons placed right were her thumb would land on them. She didn't even need to look at it to realise it was her old lightsaber, the one she'd left on Mandalore.

Then? Then Ahsoka noticed a lot of things.

Re: Inside the Woods

[deaddadsclub]

Yesterday had been okay. Yesterday had been almost good, not that Cristina was noticing things like the difference between "yesterday" and "today" without the sun. She'd been using her phone as a flashlight, especially while doing things like stitching up wounds with fishing line, and its battery had finally given up the ghost, so she didn't have a clock anymore to tell the passage of time. She'd tried to stay close to the others she had found, but the creatures. . . .

"You were glad when the ATF agent died," a stylized painting of a whale said. "You were glad it was him and not Meredith or Burke."

"You laughed at George's funeral," said a marble angel, streaked and worn from Seattle rains. "You hated him, and all the things he was you can never be."

"You gave up." "You collapsed." "You fell apart." This from too many things to number, from all the things that had watched her after Burke left, after the shooter, after the plane crash when she couldn't even speak.

"Yeah, well, I'm trying really hard not to do it again," she told them, her hands clenching. "So maybe shut the fuck uuuuuuuup!"

Ah, so that's why Arizona never stopped screaming. Screaming, it turned out, was the only thing that felt even a little bit good.

[open to interaction if anyone likes!]

Re: Inside the Woods - CW!

[spectre_alenko]

[OOC: CT/TW - child abuse, NPC death, angst, etc beyond the link]

Kaidan sat at the cafeteria table, blood spatter staining the top. Dried and new, two days worth. He was still locked on the scene before him, watching to the end. Mouthing the words, "I know."

The glass of water shattered, spinning into him.

The loop began again.

Re: Inside the Woods

[era_two_triangle]

Peridot wandered for a while before snapping out of her daze, only to come face to face with...

"M.C. Bear Bear?"

Steven's teddy bear. It inclined its head at her, and then gestured, ominously, into the darkness, as if beckoning her to look at the horrors that she'd wrought. Tentatively, she peered into the shadows, expecting only the worst...

Just to see a glowing image of herself, picking up random electronics in Steven's living space and smashing it all open on the floor.

...

"Hey! I HELPED SAVE THE WORLD WITH THOSE PARTS."

Re: Inside the Woods

[geniuswithasmartphone]

Hardison had gotten off fairly lightly, compared to Eliot or Jono or Reno. The dog really liked to harp on how their con had nearly gotten Nana killed and Old Nate's portrait was doing its best to turn everything Raven had experienced into his fault for not getting a portal open immediately, but most of what they had to work with was small potatoes. He'd never killed anybody, never really even hurt anybody, and some of what it tried to guilt him over was stuff he was actually proud of.

Like the Bank of Iceland job. Hell yeah, that had been his first big score and it had been amazing.

But his worry over Eliot and Parker were taking its toll on him, as was watching some of the horrors haunting other people. He was starting to get a little anxious over just how little trauma he had.

Was that weird? That was probably weird.

Re: Inside the Woods

[vdistinctive]

It was a little weird. Eliot wouldn't wish what was happening here on his worst enemy.

Well. Actually he really would. Moreau had shown up a time or two in the woods overnight, ordering spectral Eliot around like an attack dog. Torturing him with his own worst actions? Yeah, Eliot could totally get behind that happening.

There were enough objects circling him now that he didn't even notice the safety stick figure joining the crowd until the ghostly replay had begun.

Hardison and Parker wouldn't recognize the warehouse. Without context, this played out just like any of the others: Eliot holding a gun in each hand, sliding through a killbox and taking out every shooter in sight without a second thought. It was only at the end, when spectral Chapman made his appearance, that they'd realize.

This wasn't something the Eliot that was did, the one before Leverage. This was their Eliot.

Executing an unarmed man.

Re: Inside the Woods

[geniuswithasmartphone]

...He just felt so small and petty, in comparison.

And at some point in the evening, Hardison had stopped looking away. There was just so much to try to avoid, especially when they started playing at the same time. So Hardison glanced up, noted that it was Eliot shooting a bunch of people in a warehouse, and looked down to check on Parker's arm when he recognized a familiar face.

Look, it was hard to forget Chapman's face. "Hey, ain't that--"

BLAM!

The gunshot was very, very long.

Re: Inside the Woods

[vdistinctive]

Eliot folded his arms over his chest and looked at anything but his partners.

Which meant staring at more replays of his many, many sins.

So that was a thing.

Re: Inside the Woods

[geniuswithasmartphone]

Hardison sucked in a deep breath. "So..." he said quietly. "So that's a thing. That happened."

Re: Inside the Woods

[vdistinctive]

"They were going to kill Nate."

Re: Inside the Woods

[whoisalicewhite]

"The guy who worked for--" Parker shuddered at the gunshot, then just stood there, staring. "What."

What was that? No, really, what was that?

Re: Inside the Woods

[geniuswithasmartphone]

Hardison just hugged her. She got it. It wasn't the bullet that hurt, it was the not knowing afterwards.

Re: Inside the Woods

[whoisalicewhite]

Yes. That. That was-- Parker hated being confused, hated it even more when it was because of something one of the guys did or said, and right now, it was both. She leaned into Hardison, and whispered, "I don't get it. Why?"

Re: Inside the Woods

[2_old_for_this]

Peter shook his head, looked around, and cursed. He hadn't been planning on exploring the woods from the inside. Still, maybe this was an opportunity. He held up his hands, called the magic...and nothing happened. Damn it.

He jumped a little to get inertia on his side as he shifted...and dropped back down still in human form.

He set his jaw, clenched his fists and started walking. Behind him, things gathered.

A compact mirror. A hairpin. A hunting knife. A quill. A lantern. A flint. A fork. A whetstone. A sash.

Items piled up, glowing and whispering. You killed them. You bled them dry. Did you know their names? They floated, followed him, banded together in a growing pile. They are dead because of you.

Peter gritted his teeth. He knew what he'd done. One thousand years in Hell had taught him to compartmentalize, to move past pain, to ignore taunting. He kept moving.

Re: Inside the Woods

[throughaphase]

Kitty was very good at this sort of thing, and at holding it together until everything was over, because there were other people here, and there was always a point where these things ended. The incident Wing kept taunting her about had literally been one of those situations.

She'd ended up getting impaled in that situation, and like half of her team had gotten hurt, but that was not the point.

Actually... it was maybe sort of the point.

The thing was, she could hold on to the idea of this ending and keep looking for other people and a way out, but at the same time she had no idea where she was anymore, or how long she'd been here. It probably wasn't as long as it felt. And too often when Wing or the bear would start accusing her of things, she'd started defending herself, which she didn't have to do. Wing's death wasn't her fault. But... she hadn't been able to help him, either. Maybe she could have tried harder. Maybe she should have spotted more signs. Maybe she should have watched him better.

And even worse, a couple times she'd been walking to try and get somewhere, and when she'd turned she'd found Wing right behind her, like he'd been getting ready to attack, and that was the thing that actually scared her. She could probably fight off whatever this was, but she shouldn't chance it.

So, onward, while being extremely ready to beat something to death with a stick.

Re: Inside the Woods

[thatsweirdright]

Jason stumbled. Not just because he found himself unexpectedly passing through what had only seconds ago been a solid-enough seeming barrier, but because his right knee just gave out on him.

From his vantage point on the ground he spotted, of all things, a coil of rope.

What?


"Where is my Crystal?" Rita demanded.

"It's at a dining establishment!" Billy's voice, desperate to stop her from hurting anyone else.

"Where? What does that mean?"

"It's a Krispy Kreme."

"Krispy Kreme. This is a special place? It must be, the source of all life is buried there." Rita smirked as she began to walk away. "Zordon would lose all respect for me if I didn't kill you. At least, one of you."

Billy's body, plunging down in to the water, and Rita laughing as she walked away.

"You're not ready to kill me. You're not worthy."

Jason struggled against the ropes keeping him in place, desperate to get to Billy, to pull him back up, even though he knew it was too late.

Deep down, Jason knew this wasn't real, that Billy wasn't dead anymore, Zordon had brought him back. But he wasn't really able to focus on that right now. Right now, he was caught up in that feeling of helplessness, of failure, that he'd felt in that moment.

OOC

[fh_spareparts]

Later today, the finale post will go up, in which our fighters can invade the woods, fight off objects, and save the day. But for now...

The second thread is for anything that takes place in the woods themselves (though please keep anything triggery or NSFW to your own journals. Link those posts from this OCD). It is mostly dark, but the objects come to life glow with their own light, and so do whatever illusions they conjure up.

Beyond that, have fun! And let us know down here if we can help you with anything - NPCs, narrative, questions, etc.