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Snowed In



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Thu Jun 06, 2019 6:47 pm
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Teddybear says...



Briar listened to the discussion carefully. She was beginning to think that maybe breaking off from the group would be her best bet. She had only ever been good at working together with her usual partner in unusual circumstances, and she wasn't here.

She thought about the shelters again. By herself, the resources beneath those hatches could sustain her for a long while, long enough, perhaps, for her to figure out how to get home.

She was trying to figure out exactly how long they could sustain her when a thought struck her.

The dead had exactly as many resources as she was calculating, so why were they dead?

The first culprit to come to mind was disease. Something had made them sick, and they hadn't survived it. And if that was the case, the bacteria involved could still be alive down there, and everyone here could already be infected.

She looked around. No one looked sick, but that didn't mean much. Still, she looked for another explanation.

Old age could be the guilty party -they had no way of knowing exactly how long the bodies had been there- but she doubted it was natural causes. This was the kind of place someone would know about, and it was unlikely the bodies would just be left to decompose like that if someone knew there were people here.

Maybe someone had killed them? That was the least worrying scenario. The killer would be long gone by now.

Briar decided to consult the others, "What killed them?" she asked, hoping someone could provide an explanation she hadn't seen.
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Thu Jun 06, 2019 7:11 pm
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Mageheart says...



"Hi, boyfriend," Gareth said, taking his finger out of his mouth and giving the place where said boyfriend presumably was a polite wave.

xXx

That was the question Ryder had known would eventually come up, but also was the question he had been hoping to avoid.

"I don't know," Solaris said with a shake of her head. "I found a skeleton in the bunker I was in, but it was difficult to tell the cause of death."

Ryder glanced at the collection of bunkers, and the gray-white snow scattering the area. "I think I know," he finally said, his voice solemn. "Or, at least, I have an idea. The snow is covered in ash. There must have been some kind of disaster that involved it, but I don't know what."
mage

[ she/her, but in a boy kinda way ]

roleplaying is my platonic love language.

queer and here.





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Thu Jun 06, 2019 7:25 pm
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Teddybear says...



Briar took a second to process, then knelt down to examine the snow. She wasn't the expert on different kinds of ash -Queenie had always been the arson of the family- but this didn't look like the kind one would get from a simple woodfire.

She wondered, again, if it might be dangerous to stay here. The insides of the bunkers weren't burned, not like this, so something other than fire was likely the cause of death. A side effect. Radiation? Maybe. She didn't want to rule anything out.

"It might be dangerous to stay here," she said, dropping the snow back onto the ground, "I think we should leave."
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Thu Jun 06, 2019 11:14 pm
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TheSilverFox says...



"Hi?" Mal said, shuffling around in Lasan's blankets. "I'm Mal, not boyfriend, but it's nice to meet you?"

Whoop, he should've known Gareth was the kind of person to take things literally. But, with Mal taking care of that, Lasan looked up at Briar and Ryder, who were caught up in a conversation about what had happened here. "Where can we go?" he said, focusing on Briar. "Whatever killed them wasn't normal, if all this ash is anything to go by, but it doesn't look like it's around anymore. And the only safe places in the area are those rooms."
S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse
a persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma per ciò che giammai di questo fondo
non tornò vivo alcun, s'i' odo il vero,
senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.

Inferno, Canto 27, l 61-66.





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Fri Jun 07, 2019 8:19 pm
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Mageheart says...



Spoiler! :
@TheMuticoloredCyr, do you want to post next?
mage

[ she/her, but in a boy kinda way ]

roleplaying is my platonic love language.

queer and here.





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Fri Jun 07, 2019 11:07 pm
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Teddybear says...



Briar shook her head, "It wasn't safe for them," she said, referring to the dead bodies, "The passage of time doesn't mean that it is safe for us."

She kept her eyes from straying to Solaris. She had been told, numerous times, that her staring was off-putting to most people. People didn't like being examined, it made them uncomfortable, and the last thing Briar wanted to seem right now was untrustworthy. Unfortunately, she suspected she had already failed in that regard.

She turned her thoughts to the future. Where would they go next? Assuming the others agreed to leave. She scanned the horizon, thinking about that as she awaited a response.
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Sat Jun 08, 2019 12:04 pm
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Mageheart says...



Gareth wasn't stupid, even though most people thought he was. He knew that Lasan's boyfriend wasn't just named "Boyfriend", but calling him it had seemed like the nice thing to do without the name. He couldn't tell if his sister would have said it, but that was alright - she didn't say he had done the wrong.

He sucked on his finger.

She wasn't paying attention to him right now. She was focusing on the others, and focusing on the conversation about dangers of staying outside of the bunkers. He felt perfectly fine and they felt perfectly fine, so he didn't think it was much of a problem. But she said he wasn't supposed to talk about them, so he quietly hummed and listened the conversation instead - trying his best to forget about his growing hunger.

xXx

"I don't think we can stay here," Ryder commented, crossing his arms and putting his hand on his chin. "The bunkers just have basic supplies. We''ll run out eventually, and we still won't figure out how we got here."

He scanned the area for a few moments before his gaze once again returned to the group gathered.

"If whatever killed them is still here," he said, his voice quiet as his comments took on a more morbid tone, "I think we would already be dead now."
mage

[ she/her, but in a boy kinda way ]

roleplaying is my platonic love language.

queer and here.





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Sat Jun 08, 2019 5:06 pm
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Teddybear says...



Briar shook her head, "Some infectious diseases take a while to show symptoms," she thought about her own experiments, how the longest living subject had gone sixty days without showing any signs of being sick. He'd died three days after the first red splotches had stained his skin.

Of course, that was a custom virus, designed specifically to die out minutes after the last host stopped breathing. There was little to no chance that such a thing existed here.

She thought again about the decayed bodies, mere skeletons now, and looked down at the snow. She was missing something.

"But you could be correct," she continued, "Though we still have finite resources here."
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Sat Jun 08, 2019 8:24 pm
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TheSilverFox says...



Well, since Gareth didn't have a response for that, Lasan decided to sit down on one of the nearby hatches.

"For what it's worth, I've had stuff like this happen to me before?" he said, folding his arms. "It usually didn't take that long for me to go back home, so I don't think we're going to run out of resources. I can't say that whatever killed all these people won't show up again, because something has to have brought us here, but, right now, I don't think-"

The lizard jumped up when heard a thump! coming from beneath the hatch.

"Nevermind?" he stammered, turning around and setting his paws over the hatch, heart skipping beats as he heard something slowly climb up the stairs.
S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse
a persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma per ciò che giammai di questo fondo
non tornò vivo alcun, s'i' odo il vero,
senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.

Inferno, Canto 27, l 61-66.





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Sat Jun 08, 2019 9:18 pm
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Mageheart says...



Gareth, Solaris and Ryder all turned to look at the hatch that Lasan had just jumped away from, Gareth instinctively moving closer to his sister at the sound. Ryder, meanwhile, joined Lasan at the hatch. He didn't put his hands down, but he did get a little closer to it - preparing for whoever (or whatever) lurked within.

"That might be another person like us," he pointed out. "It doesn't have to be whatever caused this to happen."

...He hoped it was another person like them.
mage

[ she/her, but in a boy kinda way ]

roleplaying is my platonic love language.

queer and here.





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Sat Jun 08, 2019 9:43 pm
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TheSilverFox says...



"I hope so," Lasan said, staring down at the hatch. He knew he didn't have much reason to hold onto it - everyone else they'd come across had been pretty decent people. As eerie as those footsteps were, he knew that the odds were in his favor. But he'd heard way too much about dead people to let go, even as Mal tugged on his arms, even when whatever it was on the other side reached the hatch, tried to force it open, and then (he guessed) started hitting it with a fist.
S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse
a persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma per ciò che giammai di questo fondo
non tornò vivo alcun, s'i' odo il vero,
senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.

Inferno, Canto 27, l 61-66.





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Sun Jun 09, 2019 12:27 am
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Teddybear says...



Briar didn't pull out her gun, not yet, but her hand inched toward it. Odds were, whoever was banging on the hatch was just another one of them, stranded and clueless. But she hadn't been taught to let her guard down just because the odds said she had nothing to worry about.

She reminded herself of the knife strapped to her thigh, hidden beneath her black jeans and easily accessible by a hidden zipper, and the little custom toxin inside her innocent-looking silver ring, designed to stun. With that in her head, she watched the hatch.
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Sun Jun 09, 2019 10:34 am
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Mageheart says...



As her brother clung to her legs, she tapped her pristine fingers on the fabric of her dress. There was nothing to say that the source of the noise underneath the hatch was a threat, but there was no harm in readying an attack regardless.

Near the hatch, Ryder reached for the wooden plank at his side.
mage

[ she/her, but in a boy kinda way ]

roleplaying is my platonic love language.

queer and here.





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Sun Jun 09, 2019 7:07 pm
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TheSilverFox says...



Taking a few deep breaths, the lizard let go of the hatch. The others all looked prepared, Mal was starting to scratch his arm, and Lasan didn't want to admit just how nervous he was.

The hatch swung open, revealing a human skull that peeked out into the snow. Which Lasan realized was a leopard wearing a human skull, once the lizard finished jumping back and holding back a scream.

"Nubes?" Lasan said, crouching down by the leopard. "...Why are you wearing that?"

The leopard propped his arms on the hatch. "Because it's intimidating," he said. "Did it work?"

"I, uh," Lasan said, before Nubes put a paw up to his snout.

"Then I'm not taking it off," Nubes said.


Spoiler! :
Nubes. Bipedal clouded leopard. Sort of small, not exactly muscular.
Very fluffy assassin. Wearing a loincloth that goes down to about his knees. Keeps a sword strapped to his back by a leather strap that stretches from one shoulder to his hip.
S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse
a persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma per ciò che giammai di questo fondo
non tornò vivo alcun, s'i' odo il vero,
senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.

Inferno, Canto 27, l 61-66.





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Sun Jun 09, 2019 11:15 pm
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Teddybear says...



Briar didn't let her guard down. In fact, it went up further.

The newcomer, Nubes, looked to be capable of dealing quite a lot of damage if he was so inclined, especially to someone as small and unarmored as Briar. In an instant, she put together an assessment of how to take him down, should he become a threat. Bullets may work fine, but in the case that they didn't, she had her knife. She didn't think the toxin would work on his kind, but it was designed to be a powerful paralyzing agent, so, if worst came to worst, it could do something.

She tucked that away in her head, at the ready. It didn't appear as though he would be a threat at all -he and Lasan seemed to be on friendly enough terms- but she'd been surprised before.

"Who are you?" she asked in her usual flat tone.
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