capeandcowllogs | THE WHEELS OF STEEL ARE TURNING

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THE WHEELS OF STEEL ARE TURNING

WHO: These lucky contestants
WHERE: Various boroughs of the City, and the demon dimension.
WHEN: Tuesday, August 21st, 11:54 am and onward.
WARNINGS: This post may contain graphic depictions of violence, psychological horror, and adult themes; it will definitely contain adult language. Viewer discretion advised.
SUMMARY: Vulcanus tries to blow up a collection of buses around the City in order to incite anti-imPort rioting; Lachesis mixes things up again. see here for details.
FORMAT: Go crazy, kids.

Each bus will have a labeled thread in the comments. To recap:

Bus W will explode. Lachesis will teleport these ImPorts to a location near the bus just after it explodes. Those who are assigned to this bus, you must be the heroes that the City demands. The damage will carve a hole in the street, and civilians are at risk for debris/fires/etc.

Bus X will yank imPorts inside of it and induce a week-long power switch. From 8/21 at 12 PM to the following Tuesday, 8/28 at 12 PM, characters will have their powers switched with another ImPort passenger. All characters on this bus have their new powers assigned.
Correction: this bus is located in Brooklyn.

Bus Y will yank imPorts inside of it for one minute, and then transport its imPorts to the demon dimension until midnight. Envision Dante's Inferno as the setting, but with the twist that ANYTHING CHARACTERS IMAGINE WILL MANIFEST IN THE WORST WAY POSSIBLE.

Bus Z will yank imPorts inside of it for one minute, and then with a LOUD SCREECHING NOISE, it will infect imPort minds with radio signals, songs, dialogue, AND IMPORTANT PLOT-RELATED INFORMATION THAT VULCANUS DOESN'T WANT YOU TO KNOW for the rest of that day. There is no way to turn this off for the entire day. ImPorts will be returned to their prior locations at the end of one minute. All characters on this bus have their unique mental broadcasts assigned.

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It takes Ruka a long moment to pin the face of this troll. His face looks so different painted with fear than it did when he first arrived, and the colors of blood are distracting, but finally the information comes to her. This is Karkat, she remembers, just as he turns his back on her. Her attention shifts when his does, to the sudden party of dead trolls (with a handful of humans mixed in). She recognizes a few -- her attention, of course, immediate locks on the Eridan in the group, stitched up and injured and empty-eyed like the rest.

But it's more than a dozen to one, he doesn't look like he's fairing well at all. To be honest, it looks like he's going to lose, and violently.

Ruka focuses on the burning scars of her right arm, willing that power to her command; it and the bubble around her glow a brighter red, and its translucent surface begins to expand.

The wall touches Karkat, and then passes through him as easily as water through air. Once he's within its boundary, however, its strength returns. When one of the trolls rushes to make a forward slash at Karkat, they can only scrape across its surface. It does no damage; the wall of the bubble doesn't yield for a moment.

It dampens sound and sensation both of what lays outside its diameter, protecting in every way it can the two kids barricaded inside.

Karkat flinches when the wall touches and passes through him, but he is wheezing from exertion, and the moment it becomes apparent that his assailants cannot enter the bubble, he falls to his knees and struggles to breathe, not even bothering to question it. The angry, mocking, accusatory tones of his pursuers are muffled, but his own mind is quick to pick up their slack.

He presses his face into his hands, quietly babbling curses, trying and failing to block the images in his mind from replaying- the sensation he'd shared with Vriska when those fangs had pierced her body, how badly mangled it had been by the time her lusus apparition finally disappeared, how he'd had to fatally wound the apparitions of his dead friends again and again and again simply to not be killed himself, that he'd had to leave Nill behind, alone, with no one but herself and a corpse. He'd gotten Vriska killed, he'd done so as certainly as he may as well have taken up his sickle and cut her throat himself. Worse yet, she'd died saving his sorry ass, as heroic as it damn well got. It should have been him. He should never have called her name.

He still has not yet acknowledged Ruka. He shifts so he's able to turn to face her without getting to his feet again. Ordinarily he would insist upon standing if he could, but he just can't. There's one false start before he speaks, and when he does, his voice is rough and unsteady, as though he'd been screaming. "How long will it keep them out?"

For a few moments she watches Karkat's attackers, verifying for herself the fruitlessness of their struggle, before she turns her gaze to look at Karkat himself. The tone of his muffled voice, the shake of his shoulders, the curve of his spine as he knees there on the ground... she turns her attention to the side, giving his apparent frustration or grief its time.

"As long as there's strength left in my body," she answers, voice level, but quiet. "You could knock me unconscious and it would still hold."

Karkat is infinitely grateful for the way she doesn't draw attention to his distress; that she doesn't ask him what's wrong, or what happened. It makes it a fraction less shameful and humiliating when- despite struggling not to do so -he begins to cry. The stress, the fear, the grief; it was far too much, in far too short a space of time, just like the meteor, and he genuinely can't help when the translucent pink tears begin to fall. He cradles his face in his hands and after some attempt at suppressing them, he lets them come. He sobs, great, wrenching sounds from deep in his gut; this goes on for several minutes before abating.

After the tears pass, he begins to breathe more evenly. The tense line of his shoulders relaxes a fraction, and he looks up at Ruka, properly looks at her from the first time since he crashed into her bubble. He scowls, as though daring her to say anything about the fit of grief he'd just weathered. He clears his throat. He swallows. Then asks; "You're Ruka, right? That or someone with a freakishly similar voice."

While Karkat is busying himself with crying, Ruka pulls out her communicator to skim responses to her broadcast. There's a few, but none are particularly helpful. She makes a couple replies, and skims to see if there's anyone making any progress, but it comes mostly dry. She exhausts it within only a few moments, and the communicator gets slipped back into her purse with only a quiet shuff of things moving around.

Eventually she sits down, too, gloved arms folding atop her bare knees. Her right arm keeps its steady low, rising in a pattern of lines difficult to discern at Karkat's angle.

She finally looks his way when he speaks, and answers first with a nod. "Yes, that's right. I'm Ruka," she adds after a moment of pause, realizing the clarification might be needed. She probably isn't what he expected, from the sound of her voice, and if he missed that news broadcast not long before. Green hair, amber eye singular, with a swatch of muted purple fabric covering the other (to match her outfit, of course) weren't really traits anyone came up with for a person's imagined appearance. "And you're Karkat?"

"Yeah. I'm Karkat," he replies reluctantly. Right now he genuinely wishes he wasn't. He turns a little more, so his back is to the outside of the bubble, and he doesn't have to look at the fifteen animated corpses. "Do you know anything about what in the name of lamentable bulge grating fuck this place is?"

Something occurs to him, and in an instant, his demeanor changes from one of fear and despair to one of anger. His shoulders rise, his teeth bare, and he asks; "Did Lachesis do this?"

She shakes her head in response to the first question, shifting her position, looking less closed-off. But maybe that was a mistake, for the suddenness of Karkat's changed demeanor, all anger and violence in his face and body.

Logically, she knows he isn't mad at her, and if he were thinking logically, even if he wants to do her harm, it would be a worse fate for him if he succeeds in killing her right then, anyway.

She pushes back the startled, momentary spike of fear and surprise, returning quickly to her more neutral baseline. "Her or Vulcanus, I think. There were other buses, and at least one of them was blown up outright."

"What the hell is Vulcanus? I've heard people bleating about it all over the network, but no one's explained what it actually is."

Karkat doesn't make a move towards her, and drops his gaze to his hands, glaring at them. Blood still runs freely off of his form, collecting around him, and not all of it is from nowhere. "Are we stuck here? Like, is this a permanent setup. Lachesis or Vulcanus want to get their jollies off so they exile a bunch of unwitting dipshits to some horrendous nightmare realm to get gruesomely murdered by the most horrifying things they themselves can possibly dream up? Fantastic. I think I prefer my reality at this point. At least the horrors were consistent."

"Nothing's ever permanent in this world," she says, almost absently as she starts digging around in her purse. After that mess in Florida, she started carrying around a more useful collection of supplies in case of a repeat. Folding knife, taser, disposable phone, trail mix--there we go. "And they're working on bringing us back.

"As for Vulcanus..." She'd say it was a long story, but, hell, they weren't really going anywhere, were they? "I can give you the long version if you're interested, but the short one is they like kidnapping imPorts and using us for their own ends."

She pauses. "I have some bandages in here, if you'd prefer not to bleed out."

"I'm not bleeding, moron, this is--" he starts, tone disparaging, but when he looks down at himself he realizes he really is. Most of his wounds are fairly minor, from teeth, nails and horns. However on his abdomen and upper right arm there are about four deep, ragged, profusely bleeding puncture wounds that look as though they may have come from someone's horns. He'd been running on panic and adrenalin, and hadn't really registered any pain. Looking at them now, though, it begins to catch up with him.

"Oh." He pauses, considering. He could walk away from being stabbed without much fuss, but knives tend to leave much cleaner wounds than the oddly shaped horns of a troll. The only reason he has to refuse would be not showing weakness- which he's already done plenty of. "Fine."

"I'll take the long version. That already sounds staggeringly fucked up."

She shifts closer to Karkat, bare knees having no place else to settle but in the uncomfortable pool of blood formed by the substance running down him -- is it really blood? Ruka doesn't know, and she's doing her best not to pay it any mind.

From the purse she pulls out one of those individually-wrapped moist towelettes, tearing it open and starting on getting (mots of) the blood off of the more obvious wound on the arm.

"I'm not sure how long they've been around, but they started targeting us last summer. Ten or so imPorts went missing, and of course we thought it was just port-outs at first, but then they started turning up a little messed up. Like, they'd been abandoned in foreign countries, or they were doped up on sedatives, or injured -- one guy I know practically had his throat crushed, so he couldn't talk, and someone else lost an arm."

She pauses a moment, swapping the towel for some adhesive bandages, fastening them over the punctures.

"Then we got a rush of new faces on the Network, which happens every now and then, but -- we didn't figure this out until later -- turns out some of these people weren't imPorts at all. They were actually natives to this world, but they still had powers, like we do. They were part of a team called 'Majesty,' which was funded by Vulcanus."

"So, what are they? Shitting themselves with envy about a bunch of involuntary invaders with powers, so they kidnap a bunch to fund it so the natives get them too?" He winces a little while she cleans and dresses the punctures. "The longer I'm here and the more I find out about this hellhole, the less liquid Lachesis' excuse for dragging us here seems to hold. I mean, I didn't believe it from the start really, but at this stage it's so sad and flimsy it's insulting that she even bothers to give us an excuse. How gullible does she think we are?"

He hesitates, then rolls up the hem of his now fairly ragged sweater to expose the more serious looking wounds on his abdomen.

"How would Vulcanus do this, though? What's the point of sending us here? What purpose could it possibly fucking serve, to anyone, this is just-- obscene. We'll be lucky to make it out of here with our sanity intact, that's if we make it out of here alive, or at all."

The used towelette she tosses, getting a new one for the abdominal wound. She forgot to take off her gloves, so the cleaning solution, as well as some of the blood, is starting to soak into the tips of the fabric. Of course, with all the blood, this whole outfit was pretty much ruined anyway.

"It was different when I first got here. The city was without law, and much more dangerous, especially for us." She shrugs. "As for Vulcanus, they want power. And there's nobody in this world more powerful than us. The regular citizens actually tried coming to the city and starting a war with us, a year or two back, and we crushed them."

This would gets a larger bandage, and once more Ruka is really glad for just how thin these things are -- they're practically weightless in her bag, unlike some of the other things she carries around.

"The natives who had the powers had ones based on the imPorts that were kidnapped before. I'm not sure how they did it, but it must have been something genetic. Anyway, most of that team died, and Vulcanus seemed to leave us alone for a while, but last February, they kidnapped another group of us, shot them into space, and had them replaced with shape-shifting aliens called Skrulls. You've probably heard people talk about them."

"I still don't fucking buy it. There's got to be another reason for her keeping us here, and sending us back and forth all the time, and whatever other rancid hoofbeast shit she decides to pull on us," he hisses. "She's insane. And we know she's capable of cross dimensional teleportation."

Karkat's clothes are sticky and uncomfortable, and are beginning to grow stiff as blood dries. This is the second sweater he'll never be able to wear again- and it isn't like he had all that many to begin with. At least he can borrow a pair of Gamzee's stupid clown pants, if not a shirt; wearing someone else's color and sign is bizarre to contemplate.

Skrulls. Yes, he's heard about Skrulls, shape shifting aliens, and he'd seen the face Gamzee ripped off of one when he--

Something green slams into the bubble from the outside, something not a dead troll or human, who had taken to pacing the outside, calling muffled abuse to Karkat. Karkat flinches away from the edge, violently, almost careening into Ruka. "Holy shit!"

The sudden motion catches Ruka off guard, her hands instantly jerking away from Karkat and rising quickly to shield herself from an impact. The glow of her right arm -- easier to see now, looking like some stylized arm and hand, with claws or talons instead of fingers -- gets brighter, the shield holding steady.

She breathes slowly, deep, trying to steady the sudden jolt to her heart, her head whipping to the side to see just what the hell it was attacking them this time.

Of course it's a Skrull, of course it is, so of course it's the one Karkat's thinking of, and of course he's thinking of the same one Ruka protected in that firefight at town hall, of course it's the same one she herself confronted, the day of the fight. N'tical wears her own Skrull face, ripped messily from the skull and pasted askew atop muscle, but everything else about her appearance is Eridan's, from hair to clothing to the wand in her hand.

Ruka exhales, blinking, swallowing the lump in her throat.

"Just... ignore her," she says, but it's hard to follow that advice when it's looking at her, slamming its hand against the sphere.

Karkat stares at the creature in horror, transfixed, unable to tear his eyes away. One mangled Eridan had been plenty. The sight makes him nauseated, and he fights to force the bile creeping up the back of his throat back down, to not retch and embarrass himself further.

"Oh my god," is his reply to Ruka's advice. "Oh fuck. Ignore her? I can't even ignore them-" he gestures at the pacing corpses. "This place is depraved, I thought the horrorterrors were bad, you know what, I'll take a thousand horrorterrors over this bullshit, give me all the giant hell squids you've got, I welcome you with open extremities--"

Oh, he should really watch his thoughts better, because the moment he envisions the horrorterrors he's talking about, rising in front of their bubble, towering over it is a writhing, tentacled, many-eyed, many-mouthed monstrosity that would be familiar to anyone who had played Sburb and lost their dreamself. "Oh, for fuck's sake. That was not a legitimate request!"

And Ruka just turns to look at Karkat, her one visible eye boring in him, looking perplexed.

"Then why did you say that?" she asks, incredulous.

"I say shit I don't mean all the time, it's a thing I do, okay, how could that not be clear at this point?!" He snaps back at her, not taking his eyes off the towering creature.

She presses the heel of her palm against her eye patch, heaving a great and put-upon exhale, but rather returning fire at Karkat, she turns to shout back over her shoulder at the monstrosity: "And fat jokes are out of style!"

"Fat jokes, no one's making any fat jokes! Is discussing what's in and out of style seriously what we should be focusing on when there's a most likely hostile Outer God looming over us?! I could list you several more prudent exploits, number one being copiously piss ourselves," Karkat shouts back at her, frantic.

She swings an arm wide at the abomination mere feet away from them.

"That is! And it's not even doing a good job crustaceans can't get fat rolls, that doesn't even make sense." Hands once more dismissive in the air, Ruka turns her attention away from the monster to get her purse out of the blood puddle.

Perhaps it's a mistake that Ruka turned her back on the monster, but at least the bubble does not waver when the black tendrils wrap around the bubble and pull it towards its maw.

"What the fuck, it's making fat jokes about crustaceans!?" in the most incredulous of tones, he's so nonplussed that he almost doesn't notice at first when the horrorterror begins to slowly drag them toward one of its many gaping mouths. Fear shoots through Karkat all over again, and he curses himself for bringing this upon them. A fucking horrorterror, past self? Really?

"Ruka. Do I want to know how well this bubble will fare if ingested by a horrorterror?!" He asks her, voice verging on hysterical. "Now would be a fantastic time for you to take this seriously, really, this is literally the ideal time for us to not give a shit about bad jokes and instead give a shit about the yawning hellmaw we are quickly ascending towards, come on--"

"Breathe," she says, cutting him off; the glow of her arm is brighter than ever, and there's a little bit more strain visible in her face. "We'll be fine. I promise, we'll be fine."

Well... she thinks so. And it's better to sound confident and not consider fear than the alternative, isn't it? She forces a lot of weight down on her own feelings, squashing them down into tar.

She follows her own advice, forcing level, steady breaths, in and out of her nose. The sphere is rank with the stench of blood, but there's really nothing to do about that now. The tendrils around the sphere and the jaw pushing down are a dozen lines of pressure, strong enough that she can feel the strain. Not on her body, like pressure against her head or a rope around her waist, but edging ever closer to her heart.

The sphere trembles, shrinking -- an inch, three inches shaved from the diameter, four. In, out. Focus. Focus... She pulls her arms in closer to her body, smearing the different bloods against her light clothing.

"Brace yourself."

"Oh, yeah, that absolutely reassures me, I am overflowing with relief here, the amount of relief I am expelling here is goddamn unsavory, I am just getting it everywhere and making a mess of the bubble, because you can certainly promise that while a HORRORTERROR IS FUCKING EATING US!" he shouts, panicking, and not doing a particularly good job of following Ruka's advice; he is on the verge of hyperventilating again as they are pulled into the abomination's maw.

"Oh god, oh god, oh god, Ruka, I am bracing myself, I am braced to shit, we're going to die oh my god, oh god, oh god!" The jaws close over them, and all is dark except for what illumination Ruka provides. Karkat has flipped entirely off the handle; his composure fled him the moment he arrived here, asking him to retain it is fruitless. It's already gone.

It is really difficult to concentrate with Karkat's extremely vocal panic attack looping in the background, but she can't really devote the attention to tell him to shut up already, either. The tight pressure around the perimeter of the sphere is constricting around Ruka's heart, shaving off centimeters and inches of their diameter.

And then, quite suddenly, the bubble shrinks to barely large enough to hold the both of them inside it; Ruka remains in its center, but the sudden decrease in space probably has the curved wall slamming into Karkat and pushing him closer to Ruka; with less surface area to cling to, the unfortunate puddle of blood drains to the bottom of the sphere, gaining significant depth.

Well, Ruka's entire outfit was already ruined anyway, might as well add in shoes to that count.

The shrink, for as much happens, occurs in less than a span of a heartbeat; the tense pressure abates, the jaw of the creature not quick enough to follow. And then, motion. Ruka brings back to mind the countless times she's practiced her archery with the bubble small enough to fit around the arrowhead, focusing on the speed it flew towards its target, and with that sudden speed the bubble flies through the creature. Between speed and energy, they blast through whatever bone and tissue this false horrorterror is made of, the glow of her arm and the bubble itself illuminating the inner atrocities as they push through.

The beast wails in pain, lacking in meaning, and its body trembles and heaves around them, until finally, finally, they breach through its skin. Escaping one hell for another, but at least the hell outside the beast has light. And isn't full of digestive fluids.

The sphere slows, and then stops, hitting the mental target Ruka was aiming for, and the sudden stop even sends her to her palms and knees. Sweat runs down her face, and her arms are trembling. The light and the sphere stay steady, but the same couldn't be said for her heart, or her gasps for breath.

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crab - 2012-08-25 01:29 (UTC) - Expand

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dragony - 2012-08-27 05:51 (UTC) - Expand

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THE WHEELS OF STEEL ARE TURNING

c: kya my favorite

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