Makayla
The spring semester has just started and though the landscape is still covered in crusty snow turned brown by the plows and several premature thaws the student body at DU has already committed itself to getting through the rest of winter by drinking away the cold.
Don't ask how Makayla found out about the off-campus party. Something someone posted on Facebook or a note slipped to her in the halls at school. This is her first week back after the attack that made the news and she wasn't looking forward to the bullshit she was going to get from her classmates. For the most part she wasn't subject to too much of it. If this had happened back in Vegas she might have weathered some teasing and punched someone in the mouth but she has only been at this school since the beginning of the year anyway. Hardly anyone knows who she is.
She prefers it that way.
Anyway: the address responsible for the party is a two-story townhouse with a big front lawn and neighbors who are in the same age range if not the same student body. Its frame is illuminated by strings of blue Christmas lights and a tree made out of beer cans and Solo cups sits on the front porch.
It's early in the evening but the lawn is already cluttered with young men smoking cigarettes and girls in weather-inappropriate attire loitering around waiting for their friends.
Makayla is here with her girlfriend, Emma. Emma is wearing thigh-high socks and a short wool skirt and a black Carhartt jacket. Makayla is wearing sweatpants and one of her grandma's old army jackets. Her hair is loose and she carries an air of Jesus this is lame about her. She's planning on bailing as soon as fucking possible.
[perc + aware: just for shits]
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (4, 9, 10) ( success x 2 )
Margot
[Perception 3 + Awareness 1]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 4, 9) ( success x 1 )
Margot
People only come to these parties for a few reasons, most of them involving booze, drugs, and sex. Margot was also there for friends, but she wasn't nearly so reluctant to be there as Makayla. As far as the freshman was concerned, this was a part of the college experience. To many it was the high school experience first but Margot was too wrapped up in studies and home life to let loose then.
That's how she wound up sitting at the end of the kitchen counter, her short legs dangling off a kitchen stool. She was wearing a lilac sweater with a low neck, black leggings, and gray ankle-high boots, with 'gold' jewelry at her neck and in her ear lobes. Her big eyes were accentuated all the more by the application of eyeliner and mascara, and a small silver hoop in her nostril tried in vain to help her look her age.
She was listening to banter between a few others at the counter when something prickled her senses and made her fine hairs try to stand up. She had the impression that a vampire or tiger just walked into the building-- something ferocious.
She blinked curious and searching in Makayla's direction. Could it be that grumpy looking girl there?
Makayla
Makayla hasn't bothered with either makeup or clothing that would accentuate her youth or her latent attractiveness. She is a handsome girl and it is obvious from looking at her that she self-identifies as a tomboy. Whatever she is to the girl she walked in with is not quite so obvious.
The leggy brunette at her side flashes her a concerned smile and unzips her jacket. Murmurs something low in her ear and goes off into the throng. She meanwhile crams her hands into the pockets of her grandma's jacket and flinches when a visceral sense of terror niggles at her reptile brain.
Which means the girls make eye contact from across the room.
Margot
Margot was already watching when Makayla flinched as though hearing or otherwise sensing something strongly, and was staring right at her when she looked her way. There's eye contact, strong and held-- neither girl broke gaze immediately to look away and pretend that they weren't watching.
On Margot's round face, heavy eyebrows went up in curiosity and question.
What was that? What's up?
As though she didn't quite understand right away what it was that she was feeling in the other girl. She was more vivid there on the other side of the room, standing out from the crowd in a way she couldn't deny as real but that she couldn't entirely put her finger on either.
After a glance to the people she was sitting with, whose conversation she had since lost entirely, Margot hopped down from the stool and traveled across the townhouse to go to the tomboy in sweats.
"Hey," she said, and apparently had no idea what to say next.
Makayla
"Hey."
No one would accuse Makayla of being tall but stood next to her as she is Margot makes her appear so. Forced perspective. Neither of them is sure what the hell they just experienced but then again they both have the gravity of a person who has survived something recently. Bags under the eyes or a hardness that wasn't there before.
They don't have the words for what they're sensing in each other. Resonance or recent Working. For her part Makayla feels a bit like fate. Only a bit and only to Margot. To the rest of the world they feel no more different than the next barely legal college girl.
"Do you..." A self-conscious flash of a smile and the blonde looks away for a moment. If the universe is going to force a person to open their eyes with weird dreams and murder the least the fucker could do is leave a manual behind. When she looks back: "Do you have a light? I left mine at home."
Margot
As socially clumsy as two new kids running into each other on the playground, only an exchange of 'Hey's marked the meeting. Margot felt like there was something important about the girl that she hadn't really seen in anyone else yet. Maybe she had dreams to, and her eyes were pulled open to seeing things that nobody else around them did. That she herself didn't up until a fistful of months ago.
Instruction manuals certainly did not come with the equation. Margot had all but fled the state when she was 'gifted with sight', so to speak. Anybody who may have felt a disturbance and come looking barely had the time to do so before she was on a plane out west.
When asked for a light, Margot grinned a small half-cocked little grin and plunged her hand into a little black leather fanny pack that was tucked up and hidden away under the bulk of her sweater. From it was produced a blazingly pink mini-Bic.
"What're you smoking?" She asked, flicked the lighter once, then followed up with. "Can I join you?"
Makayla
"Well, yeah."
Of course. You're supplying the light. Implication without express confession as to what it is she's smoking but if the girls shared an understanding about the underlying weirdness that has drawn them into a world they don't understand they must share an understanding that they share a fondness for pot.
The house they're in is a three-story building that may have been an apartment once. By technicality does it retain classification as an apartment but none of the residents lock their doors and the halls smell of spilled beer and lingering cigarette smoke. It's more like a commune than an apartment building. The fraternity or whatever it is occupies the place has been here since last semester without incident.
Makayla has always been an adventuresome sort but recent events have put a damper on her spirit. Margot can relate. They have this shared too though they have no way of knowing yet.
So she flicks her eyes up towards the ceiling.
"C'mon, there's a balcony upstairs. Let's see if we can find it."
Margot
Ooh, a balcony.
Margot's eyes lit up and she glanced toward the ceiling as well. She'd seen it when approaching the house, but figured it was associated with a bedroom or some other place that would be off-limits. But it seemed less off-limits when there was somebody with you. That much easier to have back-up when you were shrugging apologetically and backing away feigning confusion about where you were.
So they went off on a trip up a sticky staircase and through halls that smelled sweet and musty both. They'd ultimately find a bedroom that would lead to the balcony, yes, but the open doors between room and balcony and how clothes were off the floor and piled on the bed instead suggested this was a byway that was being commonly used that night.
Out on the balcony were a trio of small chairs and a small table to match. Margot didn't find a chair straight away, but instead stood leaned forward against the railing and surveying the view from Way Up Here.
"I'm Margot," she said suddenly, after about 10 seconds of figuring how high up she was in comparison to the trees. "I just moved here at the beginning of fall semester."
Makayla
On their way to the balcony the girls pass by a large common room where a group of mostly-male students are hunkered around a big round table playing what they can presume by the pile of money and other valuables in the center is poker.
Like all the walls inside the building the walls here are a dingy flaking beige. The once-green carpet has gone black from so much shoe traffic. A cheap chandelier hangs over the table.
No one spares the two a glance as they pass by the room and continue on to the balcony. It's a crisp night but with clouds choking the sky and no wind it's almost pleasant. Neither of them sit yet. Makayla removes a beat-up hand-painted pipe from her coat pocket and rummages through the other to find her baggie.
Margot just moved here the beginning of fall semester.
"You go to school here?" she asks. Then decides Fuck it and offers her right hand to shake. The smell of weed drifts from Makayla's coat as her left hand finds what it's looking for. "Makayla. Nice to meet you."
Margot
The handshake was answered in kind. Margot's hands were small but strong enough, with mild callouses to indicate that she did some kind of work outside of school (and the dispensary too).
"Nice to meet you."
Her hand returned to the railing, and she nodded when asked about school. "Yeah, here at the U. I'm an ecology major." It had the tone of 'for now'. She sounded a lot like a girl who hadn't quite made up her mind yet. It was almost like she was a college freshman or something.
She cleared her throat and hesitated. There was a sound of suspension in her voice, like she wanted to say something but couldn't quite figure out what. She wanted to talk about the draw from across the room. It wasn't the kind of attention that you saw in sappy romance movies-- it was something almost... chemical? Something that ran across leylines perhaps? She had no idea how to explain it, but it was something else and she just couldn't ignore it.
Makayla
"Cool."
One would think if Makayla were also a student she would have said so. At least offered up her major. She doesn't seem cagey so much as embracing the obviousness of her youth and her outsiderness. She is a few months behind the rest of the freshmen at this party and isn't even sure if she's going to graduate high school let alone go on to university.
That's nothing she's going to tell someone she just met. Not when they're both trying to figure out what it was that drew their eyes to each other from across a crowded room. There must be at least two hundred people on the premises right now. It wasn't as if they were alone in a lobby somewhere.
Laughter and roared good-nature insults from the poker game and then from upstairs:
POP! POP!
Makayla's eyes go wide. She grew up in Las Vegas. She recognizes gunshots when she hears them.
A few seconds later, a third shot
POP!
followed by an almost imperceptible shudder in the building. The windows rattle and the furniture on the balcony shakes.
Margot
During the lull in conversation, Margot looked back inside-- seeing if anybody else was coming to join them for a some out on the balcony. She then looked to Makayla once more. Her mouth opened as though to say something, but then--
pop! pop! pop!
Gunshots rang through the air and Margot startled like a deer in the field who may have heard the same thing. Her already large eyes went very wide and she grasped the railing tight with one hand, whipped around with her other hand out (as though to defend from nothing) to look back inside.
"Holy shit," she said, but then the house and balcony shook and she grasped the railing tightly with both hands. Her first thought was earthquake, because she'd just moved from the east coast out west, but then she realized that earthquakes weren't so common to Denver as she may have reflexively thought.
Soon as the shaking stopped Margot paused, then grabbed the balcony doors and shut them quickly. Leaned against them and looked to Makayla with her lantern eyes wide.
"What the hell should we do?" Going back inside didn't seem like a good idea.
Makayla
"Shit..."
Going back inside was absolutely not a good idea but staying out here didn't appear to be an option either.
They cannot see beyond the balcony. Where before they had the snow-stained lawn below and the light-polluted sky overhead and the streetlights and the trees and the mountains and the stars now they have darkness. Impenetrable darkness. No ground below them and no sky about. As if the building itself is now hanging in a void.
It dawns on Makayla that this is a thing that's happening. A slow dawning but a dawning all the same.
"SHIT."
Movement inside as the rest of the partygoers react to the gunshots and the darkness outside the window.
Margot
SHIT.
Margot followed Makayla's eyes down and out into.... nothing.
"Shit!", she echoed the sentiment.
Margot breathed quick and shallow for a couple of seconds, then closed her eyes and huffed a few forced deep breaths. Opened her eyes again to check and make sure she wasn't imagining things, or that her retena weren't somehow malfunctioning. Still nothing, just blackness. She could see that it began where the front step stopped.
Swallowing, she looked at Makayla and asked: "Do you see that too?"
Followed up with: "We have to go back in..."
Makayla
Do you see that too?
"I don't see anything!"
But that answers the question. There's nothing beyond the balcony and it isn't just Margot whose eyeholes have ceased to function properly. Their options are to stand outside where the nothing feels as if it's pressing in hungry looking to swallow anything that isn't supposed to be there. They have to go back in.
"Okay." Makayla sounds as if her throat has gone dry even though she hadn't had the chance to pack and spark the bowl. She pockets all of her gear and Margot's bright-pink mini-Bic without thinking. Sorry Margot. "Okay. Let's go."
They go in together and once the balcony doors are shut behind them they can see the poker players are all huddled over their phones. None of them appear to be working. A quiet chorus of perplexed swearing and among them a lone female grad student. She is scarcely larger than Makayla and appears as if she's well into her twenties if not her thirties already. Must be someone's older sister or the RA. Her brown hair is secured in a sloppy clip and her black-rimmed glasses give her an appearance of mousy authority.
"So, um," she's saying to anyone who'll listen, "I think maybe the elevator's broken? I can't get back down to my room, if someone could come show me what I'm doing wrong? I'm sure it's my fault."
Makayla frowns. She doesn't remember there being an elevator in this building but then when they arrived it was only three stories high. At this point she just wants to figure out what's going on. She glances to Margot to see what she wants to do.
Margot
Inside they went, and there was not the flurry of movement and panic that Margot had been worried about. She was scared that this was an active shooter, and that somebody was still inside prowling around and hunting for people to kill. Who knew, maybe there still was? Maybe they were down on a floor lower than them.
The elevator's not working, and Margot's lantern eyes were upon the mousy-haired young woman, ears drawn by the words. She remembered sticky stairs, but no elevator at all.
She looked at Makayla significantly and muttered under her breath: "You should ask her what's up-- those sounded like gunshots..." She didn't want to be stuck out in nothingness at all, let alone with some maniac on a mission with a gun.
"I just wanna... look around first."
Makayla
Now isn't the time to remind everyone that she's just a high school student not some sort of world-class sleuth but Makayla isn't supposed to be here and her girlfriend is downstairs somewhere and besides this shit happens on TV all the time and the kids all end up okay in the end. Usually. Most of the time.
Margot suggests that she go talk to the woman and Makayla chews her lower lip a moment before deciding okay sure she can do that. She just wants to look around. Doesn't make much sense to her but who is she to argue with a college student.
So Makayla leaves Margot to approach the grad student. Their conversation occurs in a muffle compared to the frat boys' collective confusion. The woman gestures off in the direction of the stairwell they used to reach this floor and Makayla gives Margot a glance back before nodding and walking off to join her.
Do your thing, Margot.
Margot
[Matter and Prime scan!]
Dice: 1 d10 TN7 (9) ( success x 2 ) [WP]
Makayla
Margot is still figuring out how her burst of wild talent has sublimated into something greater. And she finds it difficult to control still sometimes. Finds it even more difficult to use when she isn't sure what she's doing. Still: she knows her eyes are open. She knows that she can read the energy in the room. She can sense the building's underlying structure and its stability or lack thereof.
She can sense the ebbing of something in Makayla. That flicker-flash of recognition they had had in each other was not emotional or chemical. It was magical. She and Makayla are cut from the same cloth. They just don't understand how yet.
And this building gives her a strange sensation. It still exists and it is still real but there is a sense of Something Else shrouding it. It is both as it was and not as it was. A throwback perhaps. A remembrance.
Or else there's been a carbon monoxide leak and they're all just collectively hallucinating before they die of asphyxiation. Margot doesn't feel any different than she normally does though. She feels fine. So does the building. So does the world. It also isn't its own right now.
As she looks up from her gazing into the ether Margot can see Makayla and the grad student moving to the elevator. The grad student hauls back its metal gate and closes it behind them. It descends sure. She can say with utter certainty that the elevator car descends. But a moment later it comes down from the floor above.
Margot
Margot stared at nothing and everything at once while she felt the energy and pattern of her surroundings. Her heart was tugging and telling her something was Not Quite Right to begin with, but this was all affirmed by the gunshots, the earthquake, and their falling out of reality and into an island of non-existance.
Or so she'd thought. When she tapped into the world around her she was abe to feel that things were still where they were supposed to be, largely. It wasn't that they'd moved, it was that something had engulfed and covered them up. Something in her gut more than in what she was sensing told her that it had to be temporary. It had happened so without warning that it couldn't be permanent, could it?
She blinked her eyes and came back into what was happening around her in time to see Makayla and the girl with glasses go into the elevator. Some lingering connection to what was happening on the material plane of existance around her told her that even though the elevator certainly went down to the next floor it was also descending from the floor above.
"Oh good," she muttered to herself, and approached the elevator to stand nearby(ish) and see who came out.
Makayla
The gate opens and Makayla peers out grim-faced with what she and the grad student have apparently discovered. Her lips are set in a straight line and she has unzipped her jacket now that she has resigned herself to remaining indoors for the duration.
"Come see this," she calls to Margot. The grad student seems a shade paler than she had before the two set off on the elevator. Breathing faster.
Margot
Margot strode over to join the two other ladies by the elevator doors. She had already surmised by the group of people huddled over their phones, moving them close to windows and up near the ceiling to straing for a signal, that her own smartphone would do her no good.
"The elevator just loops on this floor. I watched-- you guys went down, the elevator moved, but you wound up back here."
She spoke as though she were analyzing and processing what was going on still. Like she may as well be standing before a chalk board and looking over week's worth of chalk scratchings that came together to form an equation.
"That stuff we saw outside? It's not... nothing. It's a cover. We didn't go anywhere."
Makayla
[makayla: manip + empathy for a thing]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 4, 8, 10) ( success x 2 )
Makayla
"Oh well that's comforting."
This from Makayla. The grad student looks as if she would keep on trying the elevator hoping for something different to happen if it weren't for the presence of two rational minds. With the girls standing in the way of the door she can't though.
So she leans against the elevator wall and slides down slowly. Tears start to slide down her cheeks. Panic and fear roll off of her like rank sweat and as her eyes travel around the outside of the elevator she asks, "Are we in hell?"
Makayla looks over at Margot and manages not to roll her eyes before holding out her hand to the grad student.
"Janice, come on, we don't have time for this."
Janice gets to her feet though she doesn't stop crying. In the silence that persists something begins to occur to Margot. The racket they had left behind in the common room has stopped. They can't hear any of the frat guys who had been playing poker a moment before.
"Where--" Janice. swipes tears from her face with her wrist. "Where is everyone?"
Margot
The grad student used to have an air of authority, but she wasn't having an easy time grasping what was going on around them. Perhaps it was because she'd never seen the things that she and Makayla had seen, hadn't felt the sudden surge, push, pull, explosion that burst them into a different plane entirely.
Margot didn't know much, but she did know that things kept on. This wasn't going to be the end, because there never would be an end.
"No," she answered while Makayla held out a hand to help the older gal up. "It's more like... Groundhog Day."
As Janice asked where everyone was, Margot noticed the odd quiet consuming the building (or at least the floor of it they were bound to). "I thought I just saw them...," she said thoughtfully, and looked to Makayla with a worried crease of her brow before hem-hemming anxiously and beginning to look around in search of other people.
Makayla
Margot sets off back towards the common room and Makayla only lets her take a few steps on her own before she says "Come on" to Janice and urges the older woman on with them.
They had seen plenty of people milling about before. As they head back towards the common room they cannot hear the sounds of anyone breathing or fiddling with their smartphones. None of the bitching or general confusion they had experienced before precedes them. As they draw closer though they can hear a shuffling and a snuffling as a large body picks itself up off the floor and looks around.
There were at least four guys in that room before. The first of them comes out now with his eyes gone to fog but not blind. He cants his head as he catches sight of the three women clustered by the useless elevator and starts to walk towards them.
Janice is hyperventilating.
Makayla says "STAY BACK!" in a voice that warbles with recent encounters that have proven to her how little her pursuer is likely to listen to her. This one does not listen at all. He just speeds up.
So Makayla screams and grabs hold of both Margot and Janice like to assure herself they're still there before she breaks into a sprint down the hallway perpendicular. The frat brother grunts and follows suit.
Janice is panicking but she isn't stupid. She turns on her heel and tears after Makayla before the frat brother can take more than five steps.
Margot
They didn't make it too far forward before the three of them heard something and stopped moving all at once. There was a thumping, a shuffling movement of something heavy on the floor. With all senses tingling for how much they strained, in particular her hearing, Margot looked surprised when one of the several frat boys that were previously playing poker against one another first appeared.
They all noticed that his eyes were clouded. Makayla hollered for him to stay back but he stumbled forward more quickly.
Margot didn't need to be told twice to run. Makayla could run, Janice could run, but Margot could run. Short legs were powerful ones and something about being that close to the ground with a light body weight made sprinting that much easier. She beat both of the other girls down at the end of the hall and had grabbed hold of a door frame so she could whip herself around into a room.
Not to barricade herself in, oh no, but to look hastily around for something to grab. There! Set up on a dresser against the nearby wall was a Mississippi Mud jug, ceramic and brown glass and heavy with a handle that fit her hand nicely. She seized it by the handle and came back out into the hallway with her eyes flashing wild and her arm cocked with the jug in hand.
Scared, sure, but he was only flesh. Her odds defending them couldn't be so bad.
Margot
[Init! 7 +]
Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (5) ( fail )
Makayla
Makayla runs slightly faster than does Janice but Janice is an RA and a doctoral candidate. She doesn't have time to go to the gym. One day Makayla will understand what a sedentary lifestyle does to her ability to haul ass down a hallway.
The two keep on running once Margot stops to make her stand against the ambling fraternity brother. Though his eyes have gone cloud-pale the rest of him appears normal. Normal if more inclined to kill her in the most sadistic way possible than he would have been ten minutes ago.
[+1]
Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (10) ( success x 1 )
Margot
[Brain with a jug! Dex 4 + Melee 0 (+1 diff)]
Dice: 4 d10 TN7 (1, 2, 5, 10) ( success x 1 )
Margot
[Bashing Damage: Str 2 + 2]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (5, 5, 9, 9) ( success x 2 )
Makayla
[soak!]
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 9) ( success x 1 )
Makayla
It isn't until she hears the thunk of an empty beer jug colliding with a human skull that it occurs to Makayla that Margot isn't following along after them. She skids to a halt.
"Margot, what the hell!"
Like come on dude you're not supposed to engage the possessed frat boys you're supposed to run away from them. Jesus haven't you ever seen a zombie movie before.
Meanwhile the guy reaches for her throat with the intent to put her on the ground.
[str + brawl: sort of a grapple maneuver. if it's successful she'll be pinned.]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (4, 4, 5, 5, 7) ( success x 1 )
Makayla
[needed more successes than that! rolling damage.]
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (2, 7, 9) ( success x 2 )
Margot
[Soak]
Dice: 2 d10 TN6 (2, 5) ( fail )
Makayla
The jug doesn't do much more than bruise the once-gentleman and his retaliation thumps Margot in the throat but doesn't knock the wind out of her. It hurts sure and it will blossom into its own breed of bruise by the end of the night. Slow her down in the meantime. But she can still breathe just fine and she didn't find herself pinned to the dirty carpet underneath the frat guy.
While that is happening Makayla doubles back to get between the two of them and try and pull Margot back to the task of running the fuck away.
"GET OFF HER, FUCKHEAD!"
Margot
As the frat guy approached, Margot stood with knees bent and ready to attack. It was kind of like seeing an oppossum backed into a corner, hissing and sort of threatening but ultimately not much of a match on its own. The guy with the clouded eyes came toward them, and Margot answered by swinging the jug toward his head.
Though the thump was heavy, it didn't have quite enough momentum and just bounced off his dense skull. There might be a goose egg later but it certainly didn't slow him down any. Makayla yelled some kind of a 'what the hell', and Margot glanced back at her. It was in that moment that the guy grabbed at her throat. Seeing the movement in the corner of her eye Margot flinched, but thankfully the frat boy's grasp wasn't that good and neither was his aim. All he wound up doing was hitting her in the throat, but that hurt pretty damn bad all the same.
Margot stumbled backward while Makayla pulled to free her from the attacker. One hand covered her throat, her eyes watered and her lungs struggled to pull breath past the contracted muscles in her neck but she was still breathing (even if it did hurt) and ultimately still okay.
Half-grabbing Makayla back, she turned and bailed back into the room where she'd found the jug, hauling the other teenage girl along with. Hoping that Janice was already in there, because she'd sort of lost track of her.
Makayla
Janice is down the damned hall trying to get out of there. Makayla has not lost track of her. Makayla has not lost track of her and the thought of being trapped in a smelly bedroom when a possessed guy is trying to beat the shit out of one of them doesn't appeal to her any more than staying out on the balcony had.
"NO, THIS WAY!"
If Margot wants to fight to make a stand in the bedroom they're going to have a problem. If she wants to turn and run to the end of the hall with Makayla they're going to have a different breed of problem. Their problem right now is a choice and a persistent young man who's the size of both of them put together.
Margot
Margot was disoriented, not because she'd been knocked silly necessarily, but rather because there was a lot going on at once. Though she had survived something traumatic once before it was an entirely different situation, and she barely had control of how she handled it in the first place. Here she wasn't sure what the best idea was-- fighting had been eliminated from the list, but she didn't know where to run or how long a barricade would last.
No! Makayla shouted. This way!
Margot certainly didn't fight the direction. Glancing hastily at the big college student who was struggling to get his hands on them, she scrambled and raced along with Makayla through the hall. At least she was fast, Makayla didn't have to worry about her lagging behind regardless of her confusion.
Margot
[Stamina 2 + Athletics 2: Get away!]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 6, 7) ( success x 2 )
Makayla
[makayla: run!]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 6, 6, 9) ( success x 3 )
Makayla
[frat boy: i chase you!]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 6, 7, 10, 10) ( success x 4 )
Makayla
[frat boy gets to body slam margot poor margot]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 5, 9) ( success x 1 )
Margot
[Ahhh dodge! Dex 4 + Athletics 2]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )
Margot
[Keep running ahhhh!]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 5, 9) ( success x 1 )
Makayla
[makayla: MORE RUNNING]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 5, 5, 9) ( success x 1 )
Makayla
[frat boy: WHEE]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (3, 5, 6, 7, 9) ( success x 3 )
Makayla
[janice: jfc woman there are fire extinguishers everywhere will you do something]
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (6, 8, 9) ( success x 4 ) [WP]
Makayla
[damage!]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 6, 6, 10, 10) ( success x 4 )
Makayla
[ow!!]
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 9) ( success x 1 )
Makayla
Despite being smaller and faster neither of the girls has any luck escaping from the madman. If it weren't for the fact that their new friend has been hanging out at the end of the hall waiting to see if they were going to stop screwing around and come join her this could have ended badly. The frat boy manages to catch up to them twice.
At first it seems as if he's going to succeed in slamming Margot to the filthy floor but she is fleet of foot and evades his grasp. By then the presence at the end of the hall has ceased to be static. Janice has pried one of the rusty and otherwise useless fire extinguishers from its bindings on the wall and hurried down the corridor to meet them.
As the possessed man is reaching to grab for Margot's collar again a flash of red comes up and collides with his jaw. A cracking THUD and the force not only spins the big guy around but drops him to the floor. The impact has him seeing stars for a moment.
And then Janice brings the extinguisher down hard between his shoulder blades. Whether that does any permanent damage or not they cannot tell yet. Or at least they cannot tell without lingering to sense his vital signs. Janice drops the improvised weapon after that and pants for both breath and composure.
Now that they're stood still long enough to pay attention to their surroundings they realize the floor they're on is a goddamn horror show. The overhead lights are broken and flickering and dark stains streak the walls. In the distance they can hear human-yet-not voices cackling and growing. If that crazy bastard is any indication everyone in the place has gone insane.
"Are you okay?" Janice asks. At least she's still in control of herself. Her dark eyes are not clouded behind her spectacles though the lenses themselves are blotted with drying saltwater.
Meanwhile the three become aware of a cloying smell. Being women they're all familiar with that smell: old blood. They cannot however find a source for it. The walls are scuffed and smudged and one section even boasts a huge scar as if someone dragged an axe some distance but the stains on the drywall are not blood.
"I'm fucking great," says Makayla. "Can we please get the hell out of here?"
Margot
Since cracking the fellow in the head with a Mississippi Mud jug he seemed to have it out for her. When it came down to it, Margot couldn't really blame her. But even though she was fast and she knew it this man bent on death and damage kept catching up to her and Makayla. He grabbed at her twice and she narrowly evaded each time-- the first because she'd wrenched herself away from his grasp, the second time because Janice had come in with the assist.
She eyeballed the fire extinguisher as though it were the best idea in the world, then looked around when confident that nothing else was going to be trying to grab at her throat in the immediate moment.
"Jesus Christ," she breathed when she realized what had happened with the walls. She noticed the indistinct and ominous chatter behind the walls too, and shivered uncomfortably.
"I would love to, but the question is-- how?"
This said with another uncertain and wary glance toward the nearest window--if she could find one. She was waiting for Pyramid Head to come busting through a wall like the Kool-Aid man at any minute.
Makayla
"I don't know. Keep moving?"
Makayla was never a big gamer. She spent most of her childhood outside running around and the second she got behind a go-kart wheel for the first time her life was over. Or began. Depends on how you want to look at it. The concept of uncovering a map and searching for keys in order to progress through a level isn't an analogy for which her brain reaches.
And Janice seems to have expended a good chunk of her bravery for the day. She is still breathing heavily but she hasn't dissolved into panic yet.
Not even when she feels something dribbling down her upper lip. The girls see it before she reaches up to touch the dark red that's oozed out of her left and then her right nostril. Not even when an uproar of laughter comes hurtling down the hall from across the building and gurgles around the corner.
That noise more than the laughter of the possessed residents does not sound at all human. Janice pales and presses her sleeve to her bleeding nose. Makayla swipes her hair back from her face and decides well fuck it she doesn't want to die now keeping moving sounds like the best of their options.
"I'm not going back that way," she says as if anyone was arguing with her. "There's no point. The elevator's being retarded."
Margot
Behind them was the common area and the elevator that they already knew wouldn't work-- an elevator that didn't seem to be there when she and Makayla had initially stepped out onto the balcony. They were in a hall, with another branch of hallway up ahead of them. Margot thought of it as being kind of like a motel.
They weren't going back the way they came, they had to go forward.
"Maybe there's a stairwell...?"
This said with cloying copper in her nostrils, with inhuman bubbling laughter gurgling its way up the hallway toward them. Margot swallowed nervously and opened her mouth to say more, but stopped when she saw the blood oozing from Janice's nose. Her mouth pressed into a thin line and something about her face said that she worried for Janice's continued company. She thought that the atmosphere might be trying to overtake her as they had the frat boys.
"C'mon...," she said, but sounded unsure of herself even as she headed forward, hoping that the hallway would take her out of this seeping, rotting reality bubble.
[[ Scene fades here, generally unfinished. Suffice to say, this was a haunting and a ghost was manipulating the elevator and perception of the world around them. The stairwell work, and they got the fuck outta there. ]]
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