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036 » aftermath: the dead

WHO: Everyone.
WHERE: Mathias Township...?
WHEN: Day 036
WHAT: What happens after death?
WARNINGS: Will update as necessary. PM this account to have a warning added!
NOTES: Plotting post over here! And a log for the living.

RECOMMENDED ♫ Deadly Avenger "Kijo 鬼女"

DAY 036
RED SKY AT MORNING
But for the dead, morning does not come. They awake to a frozen world covered in darkness, the night sky above so clear that they make out the stars that are both familiar and strangely not. The moon is full, casting light that reflects upon the snow, but both are covered in a haze of red.

Everything is covered in red. The snow, the ocean, the night sky. It's as if they are seeing through colored glasses, but that filtered hue cannot be removed.

Those who were victims of the Hunt awake where they fell, surrounded by their own blood but curiously unharmed. In fact, their physical state is that of before the Hunt, and the only sign of their injuries are the wild splatters of blood all around them.

There is no sign of anyone in Mathias except for the dead, no matter how much they search. And there is quite a lot now to search — the fog has vanished from the town completely and all paths are clear to be wandered. Time is of the essence, though, for the dead will not remain so for long.

They have only six hours in this place that is Mathias but not.

SAILORS TAKE WARNING
At the fourth hour into their stay, a storm arrives. Perhaps difficult to see at first, before long the clouds can be noticed moving across the sky, at first blocking out only patches of those strange stars but then blotting them out entirely. The moon struggles in vain to shine through their darkness, eventually failing and leaving only artificial light to guide the dead in their journeys.

The storm begins with the fifth hour. The rumbling is like that of a thunderstorm but infinitely more ominous, signaling something approaching that is not meant for the world of man. Within a few minutes, they learn why as lightning arcs across the sky, the cracks of powerful energy echoing through the air. Those branching spikes at first remain in the sky, but then suddenly they crash down to meet the earth, striking the Town Hall. The sound of splintering wood fills the air, followed moments later by the roaring crackle of a fire raging into existence. Those cracks and crashes continue, but no others reach the ground.

The fire spreads with purpose, moving outward from the town's center but never touching the forest. It leaps from building to building, consuming everything in its path. It is a living, breathing thing driven by a need to devour. There is no stopping or controlling it.

As ash begins to fall from the sky like snow and the final hour begins, the earth rumbles like the sky. Like so many of them recently experienced, the ground shakes, sending burning buildings collapsing inward and residents tumbling to the ground. For a full minute, it seems as if the world is truly ending—

And then it stops. The world is silent. No rumbling of the sky, no crackles of fire. For a few moments, there is nothing.

The sound returns with a cacophonous rush, jarring and overwhelming. At first, it seems as if everything is normal, at least as normal as this nightmare world ever is. But residents will quickly begin to notice that the fire is receding, following the same path it took before. Back and back it goes, retreating through the street toward Town Hall. And if residents pay close attention, they will catch glimpses out of the corner of their eye of burned buildings suddenly repaired and standing as they had before the storm — just a glimpse, gone in a flash when faced fully, but enough to have anyone questioning what sanity they still have remaining.

When the sixth hour ends, so too do the dead. They will blink and in one moment be in this empty red hellscape of Mathias and in the next, awakening on Day 037, with only their memories to show for their harrowing experiences.

ABOUT THE FIRE
The fire that spreads through Mathias can be treated as an almost sentient entity. It does not necessarily behave as fire normally does — it can skip buildings, burn when there's nothing to fuel it, and may actively pursue residents. How it behaves in your character's encounter with it is up to you and does not need to match how others perceive it.

Characters may be injured and even killed by the fire. Both will incur sanity loss and may cause your character to gain a Madness (in addition to others they may gain from normal sanity loss).
— All who are injured by the fire lose one sanity point and will wake on day 037 with their burns.

— All who are killed by the fire lose two sanity points and gain the Madness pyrophobia for seven days. The degree of their pyrophobia is up to the individual player.

CONDITIONS UPDATE
— THE WEATHER starts off clear, with temperatures well below freezing. The storm begins to move inwards around three hours in, and takes full form an hour after that.

— THE FOG has vanished. The dead may wander the whole of Mathias at their leisure, though there is still a chasm in the earth between Hill Lane and Stine Road. The chasm spans from one side of town to the other, each end disappearing into the forest, and effectively blocks passage to the "northern" (actually western) part of town.

— DISAPPEARANCES continue. Eliot Waugh has now vanished as well. Though none of them will notice until tomorrow...

— THE GREY GULL now has a working bar! The selection is not quite what it once was.

OOC NOTES
— FOOD will be restocked in some fashion in the next log, don't worry. We aren't going full survival mode yet.

— REWARD REDEPEMPTION is on hold for this log. Sorry, friends! It'll be back next round.

— HOUSEKEEPING Please be sure to have a look at this post in regards to sanity loss from the Hunt and what is being done with the corpses of the Hunt's victims.

— MOD STATUS What will become a regular reminder that it's mostly just Amy steering this ship for now, so things will probably be pretty slow for a while. Apologies in advance, and please don't feel shy about pinging me if you're stuck waiting for something.

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He doesn't voice it, but she can't help but think about it anyway, what what she'd experienced before everything went black and leaving a blood-soaked forest floor behind must mean. I'm dead, I'm really dead and they can't save me this time, even if I come back how will I know I'm even still me?

And who knows if they'd be coming back? No one who'd died had ever mentioned something like this, an alternate hellscape of the town.

She can tell he's not handling it well, either, and she wipes the tears that have fallen in spite of her best efforts away with rough swipes at her cheeks, trying to calm down. For his sake and hers.

"Uh, I - I saw shadows," she manages to get out shakily. "I was running from them and slipped and - I broke my neck. I couldn't move. I saw a mass of shadows right before it started tearing me apart."

She's trying to steady her voice, sound disaffected. It wavers the entire time.

His compartmentalization functioned largely by ignoring what he didn't like until he was forced to look at it. Somehow Mathis had found the exactly perfect way to put a stark reminder of it all around him. He was half on autopilot, legs already itching to get them moving, keep them moving. As it was, he gently urged her with that hand down towards the 1306 house.

Movement always helped, though he was still side eyeing as much as he could fit into the attentive turn of his peripheral.

"Can't wait to be rid of all this goddamned snow. I tripped too. Tried to scramble away, realized I couldn't..." He took and let out an uneven breath, a roil of anger that would bubble up over the shock of it all soon enough, slowing to a stop like he wasn't sure where he was going anymore.

"Doc and Malcolm are gonna have to clean it up..." Oh god. At least if he'd caught a bullet like he was supposed to, they could just bury him and be done with it. This was.. so much worse. For everyone.

"What the fuck did we do wrong?" He asked, seeming to snap back into reality, eyes coming back to Max. "Every other time, there was a warnin', a call, a note.. What did we miss this time, we had to have missed something, right?"

They've got that in common, though it's become more common for her since she'd arrived here. She can tell she's being moved along, but doesn't protest it the way she usually would, still too shaken up by the events that lead to them being here. And he's right, being in motion helps, as well as getting them further away from their respected death scenes.

"I don't know," she says, turning to him and rubbing at her eyes before she finally looks at him. "I don't - I think there were just the sounds outside, the scratching at the walls. I don't think there was anything like what we've gotten before."

Raylan sucked his teeth with a long drawn out sound as he thought about it. Thinking was, at least, movement for his mind and gave it anything else to do besides try to process what just happened and freaking out.

"Gonna have to tear out the walls. See if we find any of those damned symbols. Scratch them out or.. paint them over, ruin the mark.." Calmer eyes returned back to Max but where there had been wide eyed panic before, there was a glint of determined anger that he tried to keep tucked away behind his very real concern.

"Were you outside with anyone else? You were comin' from the boardin' house, right?"

She gets it. As she watches and listens, she wraps her arms around herself, just to do something with them. At his question, Max nods, but turns back towards the direction of the houses and woods she'd come from, gesturing towards it with one thrown out arm.

"That's where I started. But I ended up back there. I was trying to find out where it was coming from, but not finding anything. Until it found me."

Raylan shook his head. "This goddamn place. Come with me back to the house? I.. I have to find Neal and Negan. They died out here with me, I left 'em, I hav-"

He could feel the babble useless explanation start and stemmed it as quickly as he could.

"I don't wanna leave you out here."

That's strange - the fact that they'd died together, but he'd woken up alone. Did they wake up in different places or at different times, and if it's the latter, why would they have left him behind? But she stops that train of thought when she realizes she's trying to apply logic in a place where nothing makes sense.

She nods immediately when he asks her to come back with him, not wanting to be left any more than he wants to leave her.

"Yeah. Lead the way."

"It's not far," he said with a nod himself in acknowledgement before he started striding that way, trying to keep his three mile stride short enough that Max didn't have to run. "We were out on the porch, takin' in the night air when all this happened. When we ran we split and before I realized it, they were headin' the other direction.."

He stopped and his hand flew up to his head, eyes turning back to where he knew the splatter of his own blood lay. "My hat.. I'll come back for it," he decided outloud before continuing forward.

Max is, fortunately, pretty quick on her feet and can keep up with him easily, in spite of still being shaken up. She listens to him recount what he'd been doing with the people he'd been with before everything went to hell (literally, it looks like), pausing when he remembers his hat before deciding to move on without it.

"I was trying to find where the noise was coming from." Maybe it was a stupid plan, given how often people had died at night in Mathias, but the noise had gotten to be too much after three nights. "I couldn't stand it anymore."

"Did it follow you out the house?" Not 'out of', just 'out', but Raylan wasn't tight enough to mind his grammar right now. "We never left the porch til it was too late. Never thought it would be comin' from out here.."

It wasn't stupid and he would have said as much, given the opportunity. Maybe it wasn't safe, sure. But maybe stayin' in one spot with no one to help take the edge off it wasn't safe either.

"No. I was out when she sun went down, back towards the houses."

She doesn't know if staying in would have made things better or worse, but while she's engineered to run on less sleep, three nights of no sleep had left her edgy and worse for wear, desperate to find the source of the noise so she could put an end to it. Helicopters and heartbeats start to echo in her mind and she rubs at her eyes again, shaking her head to clear them.

"I thought I could find it. Catch it, kill it, whatever. I was wrong."

He stopped again as she finished, staring at her with open confusion. It took him a full two seconds to kick into gear as he gestured out vaguely at her with a lazy finger.

"I'm-.. Not tryin' to be rude here but.. how? What what, exactly? I'm all in on girl power but you're what, 5'7, maybe 145, hundred an fifty pounds at best?" Never mind that girl power was not what it was about, she didn't seem to have any weapons on her and Raylan was not in the presence of mind to think beyond that kind of brute force as a solution.

She keeps in step for a little bit, until she realizes he's stopped and says what he does next, and her face screws up in annoyance. Her eyes might even roll a little, but it's not as if what he's saying is inaccurate. Actually, given how transgenic musculature works, she probably weighs even less than his assessment.

(She's never checked. Doing so would remind her too much of Manticore, of doctors and exam rooms and medical ward cots and children laid out on metal tables, cut open and broken so the people conducting their cruel experiments could see how quickly they could be put back together.)

"I'm genetically engineered. I'm stronger than I look."

"And that means what exactly? You can bleed a stone? Grab a sound? I'll grant you that sounds real impressive on paper, but are you bulletproof? Faster than one?" It hadn't done her much good in the end, had it.

Her eye roll screams youth and, at any other time, Raylan would have taken some solace in that. Young'uns out here with god knows how much practical, real-world experience in the way Raylan understood it - the natural terror of Man. The ingenuity of Man enough to draw out the sharp edge of a soul and they weren't even dealing with Man. They were dealing with Other. How did anyone fight against that.

Later, he would look back on this conversation and chide himself for being so negative about the idea on its face, considering their situation.

"Is this... place-" The word was spat with the depth of his disgust and dismissive fury, Mathis being the real source of his anger. "-Somethin' that you're used to fightin'?" A source of knowledge, of experience they could reference in regards to it?

She doesn't know. All she knows is after three nights straight, she'd been desperate to stop the noise. And she knows he's got a point with what he's saying, that this place and the horrors it's shown them are beyond what any of them are capable of handling, especially on their own, but hearing him state that out loud and berate her for thinking she could do anything about it just makes her angrier.

"If it were, I wouldn't be here, would I?"

His expression lifted in a dry 'Obviously' before he turned back towards the house. He'd been hoping that she had a different answer and that this had just been some.. anomaly. Maybe then they'd have a fraction of hope, a glimmer of plan refinement possibilities. So much for the boost he assumed being a genetic experiment brought, not that he had any of the slightest idea of what that actually meant.

One day they'd find a good time for him to ask.

"Don't know if its a good thing or a bad thing that we're not actually dead.. Or what we are. Maybe we'll..." He gestured out uselessly at nothing. "Magically refuckin' appear. Maybe this is where everyone who's died has ended up."

"Do you remember the afterlife being covered in the town hall meeting?" It starts out with bite, she's still angry, but it fades towards the end because the possibility that they might not has been echoing in the back of her mind since she'd woken up and it terrifies her.

The bite is fair and welcome for it. He shouldn't have said it the way he had but there was no going back to fix it so it would add itself to his list of social sins, to be dealt with another day.

"No," he replied in a quiet frustration. "Though I don't think John woulda said anything. Or Claire." He hadn't gotten a chance to talk to John about his death, not really, and while he'd found and buried Claire.. Well, it was foolish of him to have cared beyond doing his social duty.

"She's not missin' yet. If we're lucky enough to get the hell outta here, come back like they did.." He didn't want to think about the what ifs of them being the first ones into this weird in between. "You should ask her."

Edited 2021-03-04 01:35 (UTC)

Claire is someone she could talk to, but maybe not someone she could have asked about death before she'd died herself. She's also someone she hopes they don't find here.

"Yeah," she ends up saying, rubbing at her eyes again before beginning to head towards the center of town again. "I really hope we don't find her here. Or anyone else, for that matter." Although he'd already mentioned Negan and Neal as people to look out for, and it seems foolish to hope they'd been in the same place and had made it when Raylan hadn't.

Raylan was torn, head turning to the house he'd been heading towards and the diversion of the path she'd taken. He jogged after her. "Wait-" Once he caught up, he put himself in front of her, hand hovering on her left outside edge. Even as wild as he felt, he knew better than to touch a lady without her permission.. unless she was under arrest.

"I gotta find Neal and Negan. Will you meet me in the center of town in an hour?" Just in case it took him longer to find them than he thought it would. If he hadn't found them in an hour, it wasn' lik-

RAYLAN - his name in the distance, screamed like bloody murder by Neal. Raylan's head snapped up and her agreement suddenly became assumed. There was no keeping him here with that panic, that horror that echoed so loudly in him, calling his name. He glanced at her once with a, "An hour," and a nod before stepping back around her and breaking into a run off towards the house.

"NEAL!"

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036 » aftermath: the dead

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hdu accurately call her out on how tiny she is! | cw: medical experiments on children

All I hear is Jenna Marbles and 'I wanna be talllll'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0r7rCcQNW2o

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