There was just something Dorian couldn't openly say, but feel, when he watched the situation play in front of him. If it had been any other way, he would have been completely gung-ho in to help Chel with the blade, but considering it felt almost dog-eat-dog, his feet were planted. She had chosen her path, and he had decided that she would stick it out.
Turning to Stormy, he could only shrug a I'm sorry, I just can't, look.
For the greater good, he figured.
HP: 10/40
chimarii
nothing yet
ayeavast
Ol-j-man
Posted: Thu Nov 28, 2013 11:42 pm
DELTA ( FOLLOWING KOSTA/SHARED ROLLS)
"But-" His words fell on deaf ears as the group filtered out. Lucky didn't move when the others did, even when he noticed the icy water had followed them, lapping at his ankles. He had a split second to reconsider - there was probably safety in numbers. And there was also safety in going it alone, not having to worry about anyone but himself.
He glanced down at the bracelet again, then looked toward Jason, the only person remaining. He was exhausted, in a strange way, beyond the cold and cuts he'd sustained already.
There was a third option.
"See you on the other side," he offered with a strained sort of smile, as the sound of something ominously electric began sparking in the background. He took off down the hall, sloshing through the rising water.
Trailing just a corner behind Kostya.
hp // 20 4 evens // 0 odds 0 ones // 1 six
astrazilla
Molten Tigrex
Shameless Hunter
Offline
medigel
Anxious Spirit
Offline
Posted: Thu Nov 28, 2013 11:55 pm
OMEGA GROUP
But all she could do was stand there. The fact that someone had tried to follow those instructions for manslaughter was one thing--the fact that Abbi had somehow come across a weapon like that was completetly another.
The list, Stormy thought with a horrified pang. Is that what it was for? A list of people with concealed weapons? If--If she had shared that with Mimsy when she had first asked, could they have stopped this from happening? Or would the Lifer have simply picked a different target? Would things have still played out the same way in the end?
Her inaction, both on the dagger and on the knowledge of the list, had contributed to someone's death. She had killed someone by doing nothing.
Her fingers were numb. Her ears rang with Mimsy's screams twice and thrice over, almost completely blocking out Chel's voice. Her chest tightened.
When Dory turned to look at her, she glanced in his direction and gave him quiet, guilty, and sorrowful look. What would this group say now if she revealed that she had known Abbi had been marked for something, even if she hadn't known it was specifically a weapon? Would they want to kill her too out of spite? Cast her out to survive on her own? Stormy was so tired of keeping secrets from people only to watch them get hurt, but for now it might be too soon to reveal it. Besides, what more could they do about it now? For all they knew, their captors still might not let them go.
Excuses, excuses. Too little, too late.
Stormy moved until she was before Abbi, and with purposeful movements tucked the stave under her arm and places her hands on either side of the moon's face, tilting her head so that she at least wasn't physically facing Mimsy. To Abbi alone, her expression changed from abject despair to one of understanding. She knew what it was like to keep secrets, what it meant to defend one's self under attack--what it meant to act under duress and wish it weren't so, to harm more than one meant.
"Abbi," she asked in a quiet voice, "who were you talking to?"
It was the screaming that tore his attention from scorpion killing, and he watched as another hunter stabbed another. The fight had begun, and the debate on who to kill was decided. It was strange that any of them would be shocked. Hadn't their own leaders thrown them to death plenty of times? Why was this any different? They were constantly being told not to trust anyone.
He needed to find Rin.
Moving past the ground, he knelt down and tried to pull the dagger out. He was still a member of Life. When he was shocked, he winced and stepped back. He was barely hanging on as it was, having been sliced badly during the time in the water tunnels.
Holding his side, he looked at Mimsy as she thrashed and then looked around to everyone else. "Are you all going to let her die first? Why not kill her instead?" He turned to look at Abbi. "She threw the first blow. Why reward her with going through the door first? She'll just kill someone else in the next room." If this was elimination as part of a game, then he didn't want someone who cut first to make it. He didn't want that person making it to Rin.
He raised his gun at Abbi. "Let's kill her and move on." He looked down to Mimsy. Should he try again to save her?
HP: 15 ((Edited since it seems Mimsey is already KOed)))
AyeAvast
chimarii
Ol-j-man
Thanks! I appreciate it!!
Nerpin
MoonKitsune
Romantic Exhibitionist
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chirigami
Swashbuckling Sentai
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Posted: Fri Nov 29, 2013 12:21 am
[ group phi ]
Milo had been a few steps behind and not yet to the lovely machine when the wristwatch beeped at him (was he having a Power Ranger's moment? Yup!) but he was a little befuddled by the message it displayed. Too late? For what?
And then he kind of answered that question a few strides and entering the larger cavern. It was a machine, but it was what was sticking out of it and churning and grinding. Mulching obviously a person before their very eyes, and sadly it was unknown to Milo who had met such an unfortunate fate. There had been a missing person and well, now they.. weren't.
And judging by Solomon's reaction, it probably was a good thing he didn't make that comment outloud. Instead he turned swiftly away; because if it wasn't this sight and smell to activate a gag reflex, it was watching someone else vomit. Milo coughed, heaving almost and covered hjis nose and mouth with a free hand.
hp: 14/20 1 runic item get - 2d6-4 3 times
Posted: Fri Nov 29, 2013 12:48 am
[omega / reaction post]
The howls of agony only stopped when Mimsy's voice cracked, giving way to spluttering sobs and shallow gasps for air. One hand clawed at the floor near her leg until bits of fingernails were left behind, but she still couldn't reach the thing lodged in her bones, her form too twisted in anguish.
Someone was trying to help her. There was a blurry form in the corner of her vision, and a faint shift in the pressure of the dagger. Through the ringing in her ears, it sounded as if they were calling on the others to help.
One of them was helping her.
Everything hurt in ways that were previously unfathomable, and her body was not at all built to sustain this amount of physical trauma. It didn't take long for her to begin to lose consciousness - still, she'd managed to use almost every remaining sliver of it to partially curl away from the people attending to her 'injury'.
She didn't want their help. She didn't want the compassion or the friendship or whatever else could possibly come from it. She didn't want her existence to be indebted to kindness.
Because that deplorable sickness was why this happened at all. There were not many thoughts in her head before they all faded, but the remaining few were saturated with physical pain and filled with regret for the actions that had become so habitual. There was a time when she would never have hesitated or stalled with questions she told herself were for the sake of certainty, when she would have destroyed her competitors before attempting to decipher the clues.
She was now incapable of using simple subtraction to determine when that time ended and this one began, so the final notion in her mind before the darkness was that she'd softened into vulnerability by allowing herself to care.
Nothing Yet Crew
Obsessive Stargazer
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its me debz rolled 4 6-sided dice:
3, 5, 3, 3Total: 14 (4-24)
The water sunk into his boots, and with each wading step Kostya grimaced further. The far off sound was not so far off, any more, and his concentration on listening was the only thing that made him realise one thing.
That someone from the group had chosen to follow him. He paused, just for a moment, and turned to see who had come with him--
Ah.
The potato.
"Hello," he said, simply, and turned back to the corridor ahead, taking another slogging step forward. It was just him and Lucky, now. He resented the Polish man for being the only person who'd ever truly understand his eloquence.
"You have made an interesting decision. Quite possibly, it is the only interesting thing you have ever done."
hp // 20 - 3 = 17 4 evens // 4 odds 0 ones // 1 six
Posted: Fri Nov 29, 2013 1:55 am
DELTA MAZE (w/Kostya)
Their stalling was long enough for a significant number of chunks to dislodge from the ceiling and hit the both of them.
"Yeah, right. It's not that interesting," Lucky responded flippantly in a slightly broken sort of Russian, hands jammed back in his pockets after dusting off the metal debris. He didn't look any happier to see Kostya. In fact, he was almost grimacing as he spoke. So what was he doing here? "I'm just looking for a way out."
He shrugged, sloshing forward. "This way seemed like the best choice."
The water seemed to be flooding in, up to his knees now. His gaze flickered back up to Kostya. At this rate he wasn't going to have a lot of time to keep stalling himself over moral quandaries. Bantering wasn't going to save them from drowning. "Well, that, and I wanted to see what you'd do."
hp // 20 - 3 = 17 4 evens // 4 odds 0 ones // 1 six
astrazilla
Molten Tigrex
Shameless Hunter
Offline
its me debz rolled 5 6-sided dice:
2, 6, 4, 6, 6Total: 24 (5-30)
[[ WOW I CANT ROLL rerolling with the right # of dice ]]
its me debz rolled 4 6-sided dice:
4, 6, 6, 1Total: 17 (4-24)
Posted: Fri Nov 29, 2013 2:01 am
"Are you not closer with any of the others? Surely, to follow me, your intent must be interesting."
Kostya thought back to where he'd first seen Lucky that day; next to Mimsy, in line. He wondered where she had ended up. He wondered if she would be the ruthless killer that the captors requested.
He pushed that thought from his mind, and instead, chanced another quick look back at Lucky, who had a bit of a pinched look on his face.
The water crept higher. Taking another left, then another right, and...well. Perhaps he was not so good as navigating as he'd hoped.
"What else would I do but continue on? To try and find a way out?"
But Kostya knew that wasn't what Lucky meant. His bracelet glowed a dim red, a reminder of what they were to do.
"Unless you mean the infantile demands veiled as instructions, given to us by madmen."
They hadn't made it more than a few steps before Taym realized that Kostya and Lucky and the other kid weren't in tow. Which made him stop. Every man for himself, apparently.
Peyton had that determined set of her shoulders which suggested she was going to forge on ahead without much in the way of a backwards glance.
He looked down at the cuff on his wrist and he remembered the boot on his throat, and he looked at the water rising and then towards Peyton's retreating back.
And silently, he took the first exit that would separate him from her.
Shivering violently, cursing silently and finding this oddly unfulfilling without Fiona there to silently disapprove, Taym turned a series of corners more or less at random, pausing at each junction to carefully search for some clue; to listen for some sound.
It was this last that proved a mistake. He followed a distant noise and jumped when something landed on his shoulder. With instinctive panic he brushed it off, expecting some monster or at the very least a spider of some sort. It was a chip of stone, or plaster. He watched it sink into the water. And then something else fell. And something else.
And then he was running through a rain of falling ceiling, no longer trying to be stealthy.
He relaxed only slightly when he found himself out of the bruising rain of collapsing ceiling.
He was coming to realize that there was nothing you could take for granted on Deus. He was about 99% confident that this was all some sick mindgame in the vein of the Deathsweeper observation decks and the original trials it so strongly resembled, but the 1% was niggling and increasingly terrifying.
Taym didn't want to die. But more than that, Taym didn't want to kill people. Not even if it wasn't actual death, like he suspected it wasn't, but especially if it was.
He told himself it was all a game. That was the only way to move forward. If he told himself otherwise, he would stop.
"Ah. You are smarter than you look." He actually looked amused, if darkly. Maybe he needed to get out more, find other people to talk to besides the person. In all honesty the clarity of a shared language was a relief. It was the difference between walking speed and a jet plane. His words now moved fast, lightning fast.
"Actually, I really do envy you, you know that? You, of all people. Because you still believe you don't have to play their game."
There was no point in specifying. They were Caelius and H, they were a mysterious rite of passage in text message form. They were Russian thugs, and flashing bracelets, and faceless trials. The story was the same every time. Justice was as relative as right and wrong. It was dictated by power, or eliminated by it.
His hand clamped down on the compact gun in his pocket. Song couldn't bolster his resolve here. What had once been the solitude of thought was now an echo chamber, and a place of rampant paranoia. They were all out to get him, unless he got to them first. And now, he could. He was cracking. Weakening. Everything about this was wrong, and he knew it, he couldn't deny it. He had become a hunter to save people. But this was not the first time he'd been ordered to kill his own kind. It was just the moment he had given up fighting the inevitable.
"Well, you can die a hero here if you want. But don't drag the rest of us down with you."
Lucky had stopped. There was a distinctive, familiar sort of 'click' as he drew the gun from his pocket and pointed it at Kostya. His hand operated on a faint muscle memory; this was not his first time holding a gun.
Only now, only now, did Lucky see the note inscribed on it for him. He finally grimaced, directed at Kostya. He was tired. Of the pain of dying, over and over and over again. Of knowing he was only ever treated as expendable. And most of all, of not having control.
Well, control always took a very fitting shape. Control was a weapon. Control wasn't right, or wrong, it was just stable, predictable. Safe. His.
"There is only one way out," he spoke, in perfect Russian, but oddly dissonant. Like he was repeating something. Lucky then transitioned abruptly back into English, still monotonous. "Kill just one and you vill save everyone."
He pulled the trigger.
hp // 17 7 evens // 5 odds 1 one // 3 sixes
astrazilla
zoobey
It was Mr. Brzenczyszczykiewicz in the hallway with the revolver!!
Molten Tigrex
Shameless Hunter
Offline
Baneful Crew
Dramatic Hunter
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Posted: Fri Nov 29, 2013 5:43 am
[ ALPHA GROUP ]
It took a few moments for Lawr to shake off the disorientation of his arrival, still alive but wounded, courtesy of a long painful gash from one of the icebergs he'd been rattled against. He sat up, his expression just a little manic, he wasn't used to pain, he didn't think he would ever be used to imminent mortality.
The only relief he realised was that the snarling, frothing voice in his head was completely silent. He was free. This cheered him immeasurably, even with the beeping red bracelet and its ominous red words. He was a survivor, he did what he had to do.
He straightened himself up, intentionally behaving far more flustered than he felt, inside his head he felt cool, calm and collected, on the outside he seemed deeply, deeply distressed. "What is even going on?" he said, holding his hands anxiously to his chest and wandering over to the pool in question. He recognised some of the gathered from the Death meeting with the hole in the wall, he tried to never forget a face. Sam had also been present at the interveiws he'd attended. Caelius had tolerated her presence, that immediately meant Lawr didn't trust her even an inch.
He wrung out his scarf and tied it back around his waist. "Is the water dangerous?" He didn't volunteer anything of his possessions, he wasn't that generous.
