savetheearth | Two Parter-Visual, on a reflective surface, 19:04

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Two Parter-Visual, on a reflective surface, 19:04

[The 'video' of Paul is a little blurry, being broadcast from slightly dirty white tiles. Fortunately just enough dirt to write his number in, as he has been stripped of everything except his clothes. No phone, most certainly. The room he's in is uniformly composed of white tile on all the walls and a similar floor. It looks like it's meant to be a sterile environment, but has been neglected.

Guys, you gotta help- I... I couldn't take it any more, those weird animals and all this, I thought they would help, the cops, and they said they had to take me somewhere and put me in this van and ohgod-

[The young man has to stop to try and relieve his panic, clasping his hands to his head and breathing frantically. When he starts again, it's apparent he hasn't succeeded.]

I'm gonna die!

[Roughly five minutes later.]
[ Interrupted in his network pleas for help, Paul spins around to the door as it opens. A large bald man enters, and before Paul can speak a word the man has thrown something into his hands. A gag. Paul opens his mouth to protest when he's cut off-]

Kid. Put it on.

[The authority of the man is unquestionable and Paul complies. The pair are joined by another man, this one sweating and nervous. The two might be known to those watching already. The first is General Terrence Miller, the commanding officer of Fort Turner. The second is the Chief of Police for Locke City, Simon Edward.

The General places a hand on Edward's shoulder, solemn.]

He wants to see commitment, Simon. The rest of us are giving our all and you what do you do? Jeopardise this location by bringing the kid here. Your orders were to deal with witnesses, not hand them our secrets.

[Paul meanwhile has backed up against the wall, muffled whimpers escaping him. He doesn't have the presence of mind to think of removing his gag. It's Edward that speaks now.]

I can't just kill him, he's a kid damnit!

[At the word kill, Paul finally snaps and tries to run between the two men. The general simply catches him by the throat and lifts the boy with obviously inhuman strength, not even looking away from Edward as he tosses Paul back against the wall with a crack that has him dazed.]

It's good you can think like that. This invasion will be the bloodiest conflict in human history. He-

It's an IT, not a he. You have to be alive to be a he.

Lets not debate, Simon. The point is, we need men who don't want to kill, don't want mankind to go extinct. If you're replaced, it'll be by some sicko who would get off on this. Kill the boy and remember the reasons. Albero will make it look like an accident, and you'll make sure it's not discovered otherwise.

I'm the Chief of Police, not a beat cop. I don't carry a gun-

[With a quiet noise, Edward is handed Miller's gun. The name Albero is almost definitely a reference to Vincent Albero.]

We both know you don't need it any more.

[Still dazed, Paul barely manages to stand, just as Edward apologises under his breath and shoots the teen three times in the chest. As Paul dies, his number ceases to work and it all goes black.

And indeed, as General Miller surmised, Albero did cover up the crime. By staging a fire at Paul Ben's house. The next day the news will tell that the entire Ben family, mother, father, son and five daughters died in the fire. The incident is not being treated as suspicious.]

((Alas, poor NPC. We hardly knew ye. Yes, Paul Ben is dead and gone but he has left some vital clues that will surely get the ball rolling.

Please make it clear if your character is replying in the five or so minutes before Paul's death, or in reaction to his death.))

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[ This is trouble. Casval knows it's trouble from the moment the broadcast hits the network, from the moment he recognizes the boy's face, pleading for rescue. Cops. A conspiracy, all the way down the state level. Tense breathing that sets his own at a frantic pace, has him clutching the edge of his desk so hard his nails leave marks in the wood.

And then the figures appear, and he's heard this sort of talk before. He can sense what's coming before it happens but he's rendered speechless all the same. He can only stare and look on in abject horror. His head feels like it's pounding out of his skull and it all comes crashing down because he was right and it's making him sick and please, just make it stop, he's going to—

"...we need men who don't want to kill, don't want mankind to go extinct."

It hits him. The drumbeat in his chest that brought him Char Aznable, in all his enigma, returns, and brings him to life once more in his mind.

He's flying, in the reaches of space. Circling an opponent in white in his suit of red, bearing down on him with all his might. And when he shouts, it's with the voice of a man embittered, gripped fatally by the bindings of despair. Of a man who witnessed the same tragic mistakes repeated endlessly, and now sought to put a bloody end to them for good.

"This world isn't fit to survive! Those humans down there... they don't deserve to live! Mankind never learns, so I'll wipe them out!"

Driven to extinction. Forced into space by the dropping of a colossal monstrosity. He can feel it, the rage, the hatred invoking everything and everyone to die. The man he calls Amuro Ray clashes with him, saber to saber, arm to arm, calls him out for his madness, but he refuses to listen. It's too late for him. Char Aznable is truly lost now.

Char Aznable will die, but he will take his greatest rival with him for the loss and disappear into the cosmos. If only it really was for forever...

When the vision finally ends, Casval can do nothing but scream. And scream. And scream.

Shouldering the despair that nearly destroyed a world is devastating, indeed. ]

Edited 2013-04-06 00:03 (UTC)

[Damn it. Damn it all. Jack curses, grabbing the phone and calling Casval on his actual, real phone number. Pick up. Please pick up.]

[ He doesn't. He can't. Not now. Not ever again. Nothing ever again.

He keeps screaming and doesn't know when he'll stop because it's the only thing that drowns out that crushing weight of all that gloom. Curled into a corner and hoping for the world to just disappear already.

If that's what you really want...

The wails die down to a whimper. ]

S... stop it... stopstopstop...

So your base is sending out snuff films now? Is this supposed to intimidate me or something?

[ There's no response...

You can keep trying to reach him, Richard, but he's too destabilized to even think of answering right now. Even if the text is still flashing on his computer screen.

You'll definitely hear him screaming, however. Loudly. Unfortunately. ]

[Lyall has been working late, drifting between research on these little monsters drifting about and doing actual work for his classes. Biology professor, going out on a Friday night? Heaven forbid.

So he's got his laptop open and network active, if not broadcasting, while he's hovering over his miscroscope in the dimly lit classroom, when the video goes up. He looks up sharply at the sound of his student's voice-- looks around briefly before he realizes he's not actually there-- and hurries to his laptop. As his laptop has no camera, he can't reply in kind, but he does speak hurriedly:]

Paul? Slow down, slow down... breath a second. Where are you?

I don't know! They said they were taking me somewhere for protection but the van had blacked out windows and they wouldn't answer my questions-

[The advice to breath kicks in there, breaking up his panic.]

There you go. Slow down and breathe.

[Lyall gives him a couple breaths before he continues.]

How long was the drive, can you guess? Or tell me from a clock in the van, maybe? Did anyone say anything, and did you see anything when you got out, before they put you in that room?

What...

[ This is someone Kallie hasn't talked to and doesn't even recognize, but of course she can tell he's young-- young and terrified and--

He went to the police, and they carted him off and locked him away instead of helping. Horrified, she wants to respond, but all she can think is: her suspicions were true. They're true, and before she can fumble through her thoughts enough to bring up something coherent... the show on her computer screen only moves forward in its terrible drama. More men that she doesn't know, talking about things that don't make sense.

And then they kill the boy.

Even after the image has faded she can't look away, horror seeming to fill her until that's the only thing she can feel at all, numbing her even to the sensation of the chair under her, the shape of the keyboard beneath her fingers...

Eventually, though, she can't stay still for forever, hardly breathing but heart drumming double-time in her chest. It's her hands that start shaking first, slowly pulling towards her body before it rapidly spreads to the rest of her, and abruptly she's reeling away from her desk, almost tipping over entirely as her hand slaps over her mouth and the tears start, as the urge to vomit starts...

Gasping desperately, she practically flings herself away from her computer, rushing for the bathroom. Tonight is not going to be pretty. ]

[[When his phone had given off its tone the first time, Bakura had ignored it. He wasn't at a save point for his game yet, whoever it was could wait.

...but it turned out, no, they couldn't.

It takes a lot of self control not to hurl the phone against the wall and his knuckles are bone white as he clutches it.

There's that feeling again. The feeling like raw flames twisting inside of him, a heat behind his eyes as the waves of intense anger and hatred rushed through his veins like so much acid, ripping lose images from hidden depths. The heat of boiling metal, the stink of scorching flesh, the gloating voices and dying screams, his fingers digging into cold stone as he could only watch as body after body was cast into the molten gold....

He's not sure when he left the house. He's not sure where he's walking. He can't see where he's going, his hair obscuring his eyes, but his footfalls are confident, even as the siren of the fire trucks begin their discordant symphony in the distance. ]]

[He's seen some bad things happen, but... never worth than a fight, or getting a beating, or a friend having a bad trip and having to go to the hospital. But this is cold-blooded murder, and he's pressing his hand hard over his mouth for a long while to fight back the urge to be violently sick. Tears sting his eyes - god, he talked to that kid not long ago, had tried to convince him things weren't so bad.

Except they were.

Right now, there are no memories, mercifully enough. To Fay, this is the first time he's seen a dead body - those blue lips, skin drained of color and painted vividly with splashes of red. He doesn't know that once upon a time, he had seen death so many times and in so many shapes, that it had worn him down, worn him tired.

So instead of screaming, or hurling, or crying, he does what he always does when he doesn't know how to deal. He gets really fucking wasted out of his mind.]

[Hajime is surprised by the nature of the transmission that he's too shocked to say anything. He catches it right as Miller and Edward burst in, and keeping quiet seems like the best idea ever. Immediately, he moves his thumb to cover the front-facing camera on his phone. Doesn't want to take a chance he'd be seen through whatever Paul was using to transmit with.

The feeling of odd hollowness starts as soon as Paul is called an "it, not a he." It only intensifies when the extinction of mankind is brought about, and by the time Paul dies,

...and Hajime remembers. Another place, another time, he was as worn down and exhausted. Not panicked, never panicked, but not in good shape. And there was a man in strange bug-eyed armor pointing a gun at him, even as another, normal human tried to stop it.

"Seal the Joker now!" The guy with the gun was making demands of the unarmored one as he pointed that gun at Hajime.

It was no mystery as to why the armored man wanted him sealed. He--Joker--was going to destroy everything. Kill everything. He needed to be sealed away, despite what that other man might think..it was true, of course, but that didn't make it any less painful...

Joker. That name...the name of something that needed to be stopped. Was that what he was? What he was becoming?

Not to mention he'd just watched a guy--a kid, really, younger even than Hajime's own younger sister--get shot by the police. It's all he can do to shut the phone off before numbly staring at a wall for a couple of hours.]

[Anthony gets to viewing the broadcast too late to make a difference.

Only to see someone he's seen before - always had spotted in school from time to time - frightened, trapped, and helpless, being prepared for execution. He didn't know him, personally, with their being at least a grade spart, hadn't even known that he had also had a number until this, and he finds himself sickly and madly regretting it, because if he only had, perhaps he could have done something - helped him escape, blocked whatever had happened off before he could've been taken away; and if this was about the disturbances and strange things happening since the beginning of the month, the numbers, the warped animals - he would have been obligated to. Had Paul had visions, too? Been jumped by the rats creeping near the school?

He hears the officers' talk about the extinction of man and a bloody invasion and cannot lift his head above water to understand it, or what it could possibly have to do with this, as far as he could remember, awkward but perfectly good, harmless band student - and then the shots blast out. Anthony is surrounded by cold, and a scream fills his head. All that carries out of him is a weak and quivering "no-o-o."

And then he seizes just as he did when the numbers had come to him and what strike him are fragments and fragments at a time of stories. Who knows where he heard them, or read them, he can't imagine for his life, but they're as complete as if remembered. Once there was a soldier named Pious Augustus, who went questing for an artifact holding the power of a god and was bound to its source. There was a dancer named Ellia who went looking for adventure in a temple and died a guardian of its deity.

Oh, God, they read like cautionary tales - along with that vision of a scroll covered with arcane runes glowing to a flash and the image of a robed corpse in a coffin with his chest burst open.

Then is that what the visions and numbers have been? Warnings of some threat, a conspiracy threatening to catch the careless on its edges and then pull them in to swallow them whole?

Or were they marking them for a role in it all - or for the culling for its sake... or for both, just like the girl named Ellia in the story of indeterminate origin?

Anthony can't pick an answer - his whole mind is already exhausted, in pain and in shock. He half-collapses against the nearest wall, breathing quick and shallow breaths, head hot and spinning, phone held loosely in a hand trembling at his side.]

Kid. Calm down. You're not gonna die. [...he tries to reassure him. Ha. Ha. Ha. How wrong he will be.] What did you tell them?

[It's funny how merely being told to calm down does wonders for Paul. With another deep breath, he tries again, but he's clearly on the edge of cracking again.]

I just told them about the, you know, the animals, and that they got into the house. And about the, those little hairy things that come out and... That's it, I swear, I didn't tell them about the numbers or anything!

That's it? Damn it... Did you hear anything on the way there? How long of a drive was it? Anything, anything at all you remember could help.

It was a long drive, like a couple hours I guess? They got pretty pissed when I started asking questions so I shut up. They stuck a bag thing on my head too, but the place smells. Like a farm maybe? And I couldn't hear cars or anything, I don't think I'm even in Locke any more.

[How many farms could there be within a couple hours' drive of Locke? ...probably a lot. Or not a farm... that's an odd-looking room for a farmhouse. Jack at least tries to make it sounds optimistic even if he doesn't have a good feeling about this.]

Okay. That's a good start. Any idea what direction?

[ Even by the bright glow of his computer's screen, Banagher has to strain to see. Everything about it feels all wrong, the sickly off-white of the tile to the abject fear thrumming in the back of the boy's voice, violently, like caged hummingbird wings. That's what the inside of his chest feels like the longer the feed plays, the kind of panicked warmth that hurts and prickles all inside of his ribs, saving none for the very tips of his fingers, which have begun to shake over his laptop.

Banagher wants to scream at him to run, even though he knows he won't be heard. To get out of there, quickly, to anywhere. Anywhere but there. He wants to go to him himself with no plan other than to save him, like he's never wanted to help anyone before.

Senseless. This was completely senseless, from the moment the General's arm lashed out to the moment the gun switches hands, and beyond all the terror for what this means, for what he knows is coming, he feels anger for the futility of the situation, a crushing gravity that barrels square into him. If only he could just reach him...

The feeling is new, bright, like a rampage through his system that he doesn't know what to do with until the BANG! BANG! BANG! that makes him jolt frantically in disbelief. It all comes out in a torrent, his fists slamming down uselessly on his desk enough to make its contents rattle. ]

What point was there in that... what point was there?! He came to you for help!

[ It didn't matter if anyone could hear him or not, the strain that makes his voice crack. ]

Get out.

I can't, I've been trying! There's no windows and the door is like, steel or something!

Is there anything you can use as a weapon?

[The shots ring out just as Elle logs on and watches Paul fall. She claps her hands over her mouth and immediately slams the laptop shut. A voice speaks to her, one only she can hear. The voice sounds a lot like her own though she can't imagine using such a harsh tone.

A magnificent performance. It truly is a pity you had to leave the stage so early. Well, we can't have any blood stains in Treize's wake now, can we?

A fleeting vision of soaring over the sky at sunset flashes before her eyes. A man falls from a plane, pushed by a gloved hand. The crack of a pistol sends a bullet into the man's head before he hits the ground...

What exactly is going on?]

[Although not the most insightful of souls, Kenji was well aware that the world wasn't all sunshine and rainbows, that it contained quite a bit of darkness as well...he just hasn't had it shoved quite so forcefully in his face before.

If he could get to the kid, maybe whatever it was that blew hell out of his locker door would kick in and he could blow up the door to the room the kid was trapped in... Fuck. He doesn't even know where the kid was, and even if he did, he can't teleport or fly.

He's never felt so helpless. Or so angry.

A kid is being murdered right in front of him, and all he can do was watch.

And remember.

As the shots ring out, he feels...lightheaded, almost empty, his vision darkens and the familiar surroundings of his room fade away. He seems to be somewhere else. Somewhere not much better than the scene he's just watched play out on his phone. In a darkened room, three giant hands grip him tightly, holding him immobile. Above him, a man stands at a podium, gazing angrily--and a little fearfully--down at him.

If you were to join HOLY, you could walk around outside and brag about being an Alter-user. That's certainly better than being executed.

I'm asking if you object or not, NP3228!

As suddenly as it began, the dream...hallucination...whatever it is, shatters, and reality reasserts itself. Once again, he's sitting at his desk in his room, staring blankly at his phone.]

...What the hell is happening?

Edited 2013-04-07 23:15 (UTC)

[The number that's been stuck in his head has only started buzzing more persistently in his mind in the last couple of days, but Hajime is busy, he has priorities, and he's stubborn enough to keep ignoring it, at least for a while.

It's while he's got dinner finishing up on the stove, a cookbook open and a pencil in hand (left hand, and he's not sure if he'll ever be used to the idea of that) that he finally gives in, scratching the number down in the margin instead of making a note that this would really come out better with another half a teaspoon of tarragon.

And then he drops the pencil, gasping in shock, at the sight he's greeted with.

He's not sure how it's even possible, how writing down a number on a piece of paper is showing him someone's brutal, vivid death, but in the heat of the moment, what's possible feels like a minor concern next to what he's seeing

- feeling?

His hand goes to his own chest as soon as the shots ring out. It shouldn't hurt like that, he isn't the one who's getting shot here -

- he doesn't even look down, doesn't allow himself more than half a second before he raises his sword again. He knew he was going to die in Aizu - intended to die in Aizu, even - but that doesn't mean he can't take a few more of them with him before he goes.

He takes a step back from the stove, then another, until his back hits the opposite counter and he sinks to the floor and sits there. How long he stays there, he's not even sure. Long enough for dinner to turn into a blackened, smoking waste in the pan, long enough that it takes a few long beeps from the smoke detector before he snaps out of his reverie and picks himself up from the ground.

What does it all mean?]

[He logs on, expecting to see the usual variety he's come to expect from the network. He doesn't, however, expect to see a young boy backing up against the wall, nor does he expect to see him brutally murdered.

He's helpless. He's helpless, and he hates it, hates knowing that he can do nothing but watch. He could've done something, could've logged on a little earlier--maybe then he could've helped.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

Three shots, and suddenly it feels as if his heart is about to burst, boom boom doom boom go the drums, ringing in his ears and he will not forgive, he will take revenge--

"Get up. Get up and walk out, please, please." He can hear the pleading in her voice, and he is trying, forcing himself to get up on his feet. "Save yourself...if not for me, for Jeyne."

He gets up then, grabbing the edge of the table and pushing himself up. There is pain everywhere, and every breath he takes might well be his last. But he will live. He will live for his mother, for Jeyne, for his wolf.

"Go to him. Now. Robb, walk out of here."

His bannermen are dying, he can hear them screaming, hear his mother pleading with the lord ("a son for a son"). And all the while the drums pound away, ringing in his ears--

("Jaime Lannister sends his regards."

Stab.

Twist.)

--till he can hear no more.

Robb comes back to himself with a gasp, gripping the edge of his seat as the drums and the pain fade away. He can hear something whimpering worriedly behind him, hear the occasional car passing by. He's alive, which is more than he can say for the boy.

A boy. Just a boy, and he'd been murdered brutally, and Robb wants to scream.

Instead he gets up, goes to his fridge, and breaks out the beer.]

Edited 2013-04-10 00:55 (UTC)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Two Parter-Visual, on a reflective surface, 19:04

replying in reaction to Miller? and up to Paul's death.

(whoops this doesn't sound good, and since there's stuff to leap on, let's do this anyway)

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text

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[Voice] | In the five minutes before his death

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second part, welp

In reaction

reaction

Reacting to that death

In reaction.

[Before Paul's death]

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( reaction )

before; computer text

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sorry, feel free to drop this if you want

LATE REACTION

Reaction

reaction

[reaction aaand late as balls, SPOILERS FOR ASOS]