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 Posted: Mon May 16, 2016 8:37 pm
Quote: Location: American Southwest - Nevada Located in a small abandoned military housing complex near a closed-down testing site. Base is situated in a dormitory building and adjacent office building. A small cluster of buildings on the surface hides a larger underground grid of tunnels and rooms once used for secret purposes during the Cold War. No secret materials or dangerous materials remain on-site, but some further-flung areas retain a low level of ambient radiation. Deus personnel are not endangered by the low-level radiation, but the irradiated sections are far enough out from the central complex that they are not often visited. Base personnel periodically visit a small town situated on the nearest state highway for supplies; town residents have been given the impression that personnel belong to a small artist commune way out in the desert. Purpose: Monitoring abandoned military testing/experimental sites and surrounding desert for FEAR readings and creatures Personnel: 5 semi-permanent residents, 1-3 rotating positions Mission brief: Locate, assess, and take readings and measurements on a probably-abandoned shadowpeople nest to determine whether the site needs to be destroyed or if it is safe to leave as is. Outside personnel will be brought in for this task due to a higher-priority job for the on-base personnel in eradicating several aggressive and elusive ghosts from a recently-decommissioned site closer to human habitation. Nest survey must be done concurrently due to risk of new FEAR creatures moving in if the site remains viable.
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Posted: Mon May 16, 2016 8:39 pm
Noah gets the lavender pins on the chore board. Annamaria explains, in her soft and absent voice, that nobody who lives here wanted the pastel colors, so they save them for the temps. Dana takes the baby-pink ones without voicing any protest. She, too, is a trainee, and Noah has not heard her speak a single word since he met her at the portal. She nods when people talk to her, and once he saw her shake her head, and he only knows her name is Dana because that's the name she wrote on the slip of paper that she then pinned up on the board.
At dinner, Michael explains the water restrictions: half a pan of water for the dishes and the cleaning mostly involves wiping with a soapy rag, sponge baths with minimal water and a "shower" once a week, laundry goes to the laundromat in town once a week, drinking water is not restricted but if you waste it you're paying for it, the toilets are composting toilets and don't require flushing.
"New guy gets to empty 'em," Timothy chimes in. Noah smiles weakly, because that's the kind of job newbies get and he's not really surprised.
Michael glares. "That's not how the toilets work, Tim," and he goes off on a long, detailed explanation of how a composting toilet works, the mechanics and how the waste is broken down, and Noah notices after a minute that nobody else is paying attention and only Dana seems to be in any way put off by Michael's lecture or rant or whatever it is. Michael sounds angry the whole time he's explaining the toilets, through every technical detail. When he finally winds down, Jessica puts in, "Tim was kidding, Noah."
"Okay," Noah says, and looks at Michael, unsure whether he's supposed to respond to the information. Michael is applying himself to his rice and beans with as much ferocity as he applied himself to his lecture, and doesn't seem to expect any kind of answer. He is, at least, not looking at Noah.
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Posted: Mon May 16, 2016 9:01 pm
Dana summons her axe three times the first time they trek out to the nest area. She’s like a bird, small and fluttery and easily startled. The silence this far out in the desert is unnerving, Noah has to admit. It's early morning, the sun barely up, because part of the nest site is aboveground and Jessica informed Noah last night that if they want to avoid the worst heat of the day, they'd better get an early start. The tunnels do stretch out to the site, and they'll probably be coming back underground, but Noah finds the idea unnerving. He's technically in charge of this little expedition, since he's the one who's been assigned to do the readings and analysis of the site; Dana's a Moon, and she's here in case he needs defending. The information in the mission briefing folder says the site is probably abandoned, and if anyone thought there was a genuine threat there they wouldn't be sending a pair of trainees out on their own, but better safe than sorry.
The third time Dana gasps and summons at a scuttle of motion underneath a bush that turns out to be a lizard, again, Noah's hands clench tight on the straps of his backpack and he turns abruptly. "Would you ******** stop that?"
Dana flinches, shrinks back, meekly desummons. Her immediate obedience makes Noah angrier, somehow. He grits his teeth and stalks off again, checking the compass to make sure he's still going the right way.
His irritation drains slowly away as they walk, and Dana's silence makes a vague guilt chew on Noah's stomach. It's stupid, sort of; she's been quiet the whole time. But there's a quality to this silence, a bubble of quiet in the huge surrounding silence of dust and sky, and finally Noah says, "Sorry. I'm just, I'm. I'm on edge." His nerves are raw, and Dana rubs him the wrong way somehow, but it's kind of a d**k move to take that out on her when she hasn't actually done anything wrong.
"Me too," Dana admits, and falls silent again for almost a minute. Then she adds, "It's okay." She doesn't sound angry or anything, and it makes a little bubble of contrary annoyance swell up in Noah's chest.
Neither of them speaks again during the walk. When they reach the cluster of dilapidated buildings that houses the nest, Dana takes the lead without asking, her footsteps barely audible even on the cracked concrete of the walkways. Noah tamps down the flare of irritation and lets her lead. This is her part of the job, after all.
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Posted: Tue May 17, 2016 8:03 pm
The buildings themselves are in surprisingly good shape, built of concrete and cinderblock, solid and squat and rectangular, two of them two stories tall, one a single story. Concrete paths are laid out between them, cracked and dry. Anywhere else there would be a profusion of grasses and weeds forcing themselves through the cracks, but here there is just bone-colored dust and dryness. Nothing is green here.
Some of the ceilings inside are sagging, but the walls and floors are still solid, well-preserved. They could easily be brought back into habitable shape, if it weren't for the scratches and gouges sliced into them by wide-spaced claws. The ancient carpets and linoleums inside the buildings are ruined, torn up in what seems like a systematic program of destruction. As far as Noah can tell, there was once office furniture left behind, but everything here has been destroyed, shattered and gnawed and chewed and slashed, leaving twisted pieces of metal and splinters and chunks of wood and scraps of fabric. Paper that might once have been documentation of some kind scatters the wreckage like confetti. Nothing is left untouched, even the bathrooms, where chunks and fragments of porcelain litter the floor, leaving bent pipes sticking up from the tile like broken bones.
In the small, single-story building, ruined furniture has been pulled together into what was probably the main nest. An entire room has been made into a curiously organic structure, built into a number of curved, rounded spaces that Noah guesses served as beds for what lived here at some point. It's empty now, pieces of the structure falling apart. Abandoned. Noah doesn't know where the shadows went, and he wants to not care, but it kind of worries him. Still, they've checked the entire area, and nothing seems to live here any more.
Dana stations herself at the door of the nest room as Noah takes out his equipment and his notebook. The sun is fully up, and the heat outside is rising, but the nest itself is surprisingly, comfortably cool. Maybe it's the fact that the windows are completely blocked, or maybe the material of the nest itself insulates the room, or both. Noah sets up a grid first, then begins to take his measurements. He can see why this is going to take all week.
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Posted: Tue May 17, 2016 8:11 pm
The tunnels are ill-lit by a string of bulbs run by runic power. In places, they flicker ominously. There are sections where the lights are entirely out, and Noah and Dana have to use the flashlights they were advised to carry, the ones that run on regular batteries. The flashlight is comfortingly heavy in Noah's hand, a metal tube full of D batteries, a bright light that could double as a club, if he needed it to.
The tunnels are long and narrow and tubular, and they branch and divide. They are cool, almost cold. The oppressive heaviness of the sun aboveground doesn't reach down here. In the dark sections, the coal-dark blackness seems to eat up the light of the flashlight beams, and Noah's breathing comes faster in spite of himself. He is not stuck down here. He is not trapped. They are following the map. They know where they are going. They are going back to the base, where it is safe.
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Posted: Tue May 17, 2016 8:20 pm
Grief comes and goes, sometimes a slow and steady gust that dries Noah’s eyes and teeth and tongue, speechless, hollow, heavy, sometimes a hurricane that roars and tears him ragged, cores him out and leaves him without appetite, wet-eyed. It doesn't interfere with work, mostly. He can't let it, doesn't. Work is a distraction, a stabilizer. There are locations to check, maps to mark, readings to record. He performs it all with meticulous focus.
On day four, he rides in the rattling pickup truck to be an extra pair of hands to haul the supplies. They stop first at the art gallery to drop off Annamaria’s latest, a canvas covered in a swirl of frenetic abstract reds and blacks in thick texturey paint that narrows inward, inward, to a dark void in the center. Annamaria explained earlier that she’ll name it something pretentious, like Study in Red #13 (Hunger), and some rich tourist will buy it for twelve hundred, easy. They all laughed at that, and Noah didn’t know why he felt unsettled, why Laz growled. Noah doesn’t like the art, or maybe doesn’t want to like it, he’s not sure. It reminds him, somehow, of meat.
After, Tim herds them over to the “trading post” with its cheap jewelry and exaggerated caricatures and racks of garish cowboy shirts, suggesting with cheerful sarcasm that the temps ought to buy souvenirs, memories of their super-exciting time out in the desert. Dana takes him seriously and spends a good ten minutes carefully selecting a pair of silver earrings. Noah wanders around the shop and looks at keychains, at candy shaped like cow patties, at mugs shaped like cactuses. He finds a display of dried scorpions preserved in resin blocks, picks one up with a smile, because Al will like --
-- it’s not so much that reality comes crashing back in. It’s more like -- oh, and the slight slow blur of his vision.
He buys the scorpion anyway, picking deliberately at the scab. It goes into his backpack, buried in the very bottom under everything else.
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Posted: Sun May 22, 2016 2:46 pm
The nest is definitely abandoned. The readings Noah takes have declined a tiny bit each day, the fluctuations easily linked to individual spots and mappable. If there was ever a spawn point in this location, it's inactive now. The nest is nothing but a mass of wreckage shaped into holes and hollows. He thinks that there were four things that lived here, maybe five, but they have either left or been killed. Cleaning up the site will take some work, and now that he's been out here several days in a row Noah thinks that he'll recommend that whatever team gets sent to haul the debris away should do their work during the night to avoid the heat, but there shouldn't be any supernatural complications.
Dana alternates between standing guard over whatever room Noah is working in and doing slow circuits of the buildings. Sometimes she takes the stairs down to check the tunnels. Noah doesn't mind that Dana goes off on these small patrols now that he's determined that there's nothing here any more. He thinks she just wants to get away from him sometimes. It's not like either of them have a reason to dislike each other. They just sort of do. There's a tiny gnawing itch of resentment or irritation that Noah tries his best to ignore, because it's completely illogical and it'd be unprofessional to let it interfere with the mission. Still, sometimes, when she leaves him alone again he's relieved.
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Posted: Sun May 22, 2016 3:19 pm
"We could have handled it ourselves," Michael says suddenly over dinner one evening. Reed freezes, fork halfway to his mouth, his eyes darting back and forth between Michael and Jess. Timothy puts his fork down on the table with a clink. Both Noah and Dana stop eating as well in the suddenly charged atmosphere. Overhead, the fluorescent light seems suddenly deafeningly loud. Only Annamaria continues eating. She reaches for another tortilla, ignoring the tension.
"No, we couldn't," Jess answers Michael. "We've been over this."
"Three times last week," Annamaria puts in, "the same thing each time, could you two just skip it and cut to the make-up sex part, not that anyone wants to hear that, but Jesus, Michael," and even though Noah hasn't been here long he recognizes that the hard edge in her voice is uncharacteristic.
"Yes we could," Michael argues, as though Annamaria hadn't spoken at all. "Reed and I could have easily taken care of it. We wouldn't even have had to take Timothy off his Moon duties."
"Don't pull me into this," Reed says irritably. He gets up from the table and scrapes the rest of his food into the compost bin, drops the plate and fork into the sink, and leaves the kitchen. The door swings shut behind his retreating back with a dull scrape.
Noah stares at the chipped edge of the cheap table, wishing he could just disappear. If he left now he'd call more attention to himself, and anyway he's still hungry, but he doesn't want to be here for this, either.
"Reed is busy locating the preta's spawn point. That takes precedence over a surveying job," Jess states patiently. "And we need you on secondary defense. We don't know how long it will take us to get this thing tracked down and finished off, and it's no problem to have someone else doing the survey."
"Tim, you mind running defense for me tonight?" Annamaria asks, her words edged. "Since Mike's not feeling up to it."
"I can do my assigned job." Michael points his fork at Annamaria. "And don't call me Mike."
"Good, it's settled then," Jess says calmly, and digs her fork into the pile of shredded chicken on her plate. "No need to go over it again. They're here to do their job and there's no point in making an argument of it."
Michael takes a breath to say something. Then the overhead light flickers, and everyone looks up. It comes back on, flickers again. Fails. The kitchen is plunged into sudden darkness, and the hum of the refrigerator stops abruptly. "Oh, for ******** sake," that's Tim, "I'll get the generator started." His chair scrapes back, and his footsteps head toward the outside door with more certainty than Noah would be able to muster in the cavernous blackness of the room.
Several long minutes pass before the lights come back on. Nobody speaks during that time, and once everything has returned to normal, it seems as though everyone is determined to pretend that the short argument never happened.
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Posted: Sun May 22, 2016 3:41 pm
Noah's room is very dark with the lights turned out. He doesn't have a nightlight, since he didn't want to answer any potential questions about it, and he's been getting better about the dark. He keeps his curtains open. There's enough moonlight in these clear nights to keep it from being totally dark, and that helps.
It's still difficult to sleep. It's not cold here, but the sheets are cheap and unfamiliar and smell nothing at all like home, and in spite of walking to and from the nest site and dealing with the light-eating darkness of the tunnels every day, Noah isn't tired enough to drop off easily to sleep. He wonders how long it will be before he can sleep soundly again. How long it will be before he stops dreaming.
Somewhere in the building he can hear the distant murmur of voices, probably the teams preparing to leave the base for a night spent hunting down the revenant that's plaguing the area. Noah won't be entirely alone in the dark dorm building -- Dana is also sleeping nights -- but he is acutely aware from how far away from everything and everywhere they are, a small cluster of habitation in a wide flat expanse of desert broken only by cactus and brush for miles in all directions. He lies on his back and stares at the ceiling in the dim reflected light of the moon, and does not sleep.
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Posted: Sun May 22, 2016 7:37 pm
I'M HUNGRY, Laz says, more to himself than to Noah. Noah ignores him, focused on his work. I'M HUNGRY.
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Posted: Mon May 23, 2016 10:48 am
Nobody talks over breakfast.
Noah and Dana don't say a word all day.
Nobody talks at dinner.
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Posted: Mon May 23, 2016 10:49 am
I'M HUNGRY.
I'm hungry too.
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Posted: Thu Jun 02, 2016 7:11 pm
(tw/content warning: posts from this point forward may contain gore, death, and/or cannibalism)
By silent consensus, they wait for Reed in the kitchen. Reed is different. Reed is prey. When he arrives, six pairs of eyes focus on him.
Reed tries to run, but there are six of them.
HUMANS ARE SO SOFT WITHOUT SHIELDS, Laz observes, some time later.
Cleanup is a group effort. Check-in and supply drop are tomorrow, and perhaps they will get someone else. Everything needs to look normal. Michael does not complain about the waste of water.
Noah's weapon is the best suited to certain tasks. He doesn't really know how to do it, but Laz talks him through the process, helpful. He puts away the leftovers in the refrigerator.
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Posted: Sat Jun 04, 2016 6:03 pm
Dana tries to kill Noah when they go out to the nest site again. It is, he thinks, a fairly logical choice. They are the two weakest out of everyone, and if Dana wants to make her own kill Noah is the most likely to go down easily.
He does not go down easily. She has an axe, but he's faster. He gets in underneath her reach without much trouble. Maybe her weapon is fighting her, he thinks; sometimes her swings hesitate a little and her eyes cloud up. Laz is not fighting him. Laz is helping him, and they are working together in a way they have never quite worked together before, Noah's need to survive and hunt overlapping with Laz's HUNT and KILL, and HUNGER merging perfectly with hunger and it's true again: humans are so, so soft.
She is like a bird, delicate and thin and easy to break. She flutters for a while.
After, he wipes his hands clean on his scarf. It's already stiff with yesterday's dried blood. He will have to wash it when he can. It occurs to him to wonder whether the mess now splattered across the materials of the nest will have changed the ambient Fear. It's lucky, he thinks, that he has the equipment right on hand to measure that. He picks up the scanner, wiping its screen clean, and begins methodically to take the measurements.
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Posted: Sat Jun 04, 2016 6:16 pm
The easy rightness of everything he's been doing leaves him while he's walking through the tunnels to return to the base. He has no idea how long he spends huddled in a shaking ball on the floor, the taste of metal rich and sick in his mouth, his eyes wide and staring sightlessly down the long and lonely hallway with its flickering bulbs. He has no idea why he takes out his scanner again, runs it over himself, shakily writes down the resulting numbers in a notebook covered already with browning thumbprints. It's familiar, maybe, a single note of something he knows in a crashing roar of horrified realization.
GET UP, Laz says, disgusted. But it's some time before the horror ebbs, replaced again by the return of calm certainty, the return of the logic of the past day. Why was he feeling so sick? He can't quite figure that out. He resumes the path back to the base. He'll have to be careful not to be ambushed on the way in.
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