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 Posted: Thu Dec 18, 2008 11:19 pm
The basement was never a good place in horror movies, and Winchester Asylum didn't disappoint. It seemed that every broken piece in the hospital had been thrown unceremoniously in to the room Irelia was in, and broken shower heads leaked brown, rusted water which looked like blood in the dim light her torch threw from it. It could be blood, Irelia mused worriedly, and stopped herself from giggling like a maniac. Her hands were shaking with fear, and she knew that whatever force had thrown her out had no power where she was, the room with the open window slightly filled with the light of the moon.
Stopping for a moment, Irelia tried to calm herself, and to think up a game plan. She drew a blank, mostly. The other half of her brain was going a mile a minute, worriedly creating multiple horrors that were befalling Jace at that very moment. It wasn't helping either of them, Irelia worrying, standing in her somewhat safe refuge in the basement. Throwing her bag off her back and in to the pile of rusted metal chairs she was currently standing beside, she rummaged around until she found her book, the eery feeling of possibility emanating from its leather cover. It comforted her though, her evil security blanket.
She moved on, past the basement room of refuge and back in to the hellish main building. The very texture of the air changed as she moved on, the inky black appearing almost red as her torch cut through it. The floor had changed, from cracked concrete to packed dirt, small round inclines making Irelia stumble to her knees a couple of times. The room was silent, the noises you would expect from an old and creaking asylum missing. It was more disconcerting than say, a shovel digging, which Irelia was expecting, and there was some expectant quality in the air around her. Looking up, Irelia couldn't see the ceiling, even throwing the light above her, though she knew there had to be a ceiling. Somewhere. It gave the basement a feeling of being vast and possibly no end in sight, and as Irelia walked she began to worry that she was in some sort of insane graveyard maze.
As soon as she thought of the graveyard, she knew that that was what she was standing in. She hadn't noticed she had stopped, but the matter before her had dumbfounded her. How many graves had she passed already? 15? 30? Or more than that? Irelia couldn't remember, but the graves had all looked the same to her, and seemed a blur now. Peering around, Irelia couldn't see an end to the graves, they stretched as far around her as she could see through the darkness, and she wondered if this was just an illusion or the truth. Was this where they kept their dead? In their own basement?
"No wonder the people were all insane," Irelia muttered, the words lashing in to the air around her, echoing oddly. And suddenly, with a low murmur, sounds began to creep towards her. These weren't good sounds, or even sounds that she had come to expect from this particular scene.
It was the airy, high sound of a child singing a hymn.
Irelia crept towards it, her heart pounding. She hated any horror movies with children, especially children with dolls, and the scene didn't disappoint. A little boy (Irelia had thought it was a girl by the sound of the voice) sang a mournful little song, his shoulders shaking with emotion. A doll lay in an unfilled mound, dressed in a blindingly bright dress. As Irelia drew nearer, she realized the boy's shaking was odd, and as she crouched in front of him, and lifted her face, she fell backwards and scuttled away. The front of his white shirt was dark with blood, his trachea cut, the mournful song pumping blood from his throat as he took great shuddering breaths, determined to finish the song. Irelia knew he was dead, he had to be, looking like he did, but he stood and sang, which should have been impossible. Irelia couldn't look at the doll in the hole, it was painfully obvious that it wasn't a doll anyways, and she turned her back on the little scene with a shudder.
This was wrong, oh so very wrong, but Irelia couldn't DO anything. Or could she?
Feeling slightly safer in the room with the kids than she had upstairs, Irelia opened her book and sat on the dusty ground, chilling cold. She ran her fingers over the yellowed pages, ignoring the stray tears that fell on them. She had never seen death, never experienced something like she was experiencing, and to make matters worse, she had wrought it. And she had to try, at least.
Biting her finger, Irelia grimaced at the pain, and then swirled it on to the pages haphazardly. She couldn't remember what she had done before, and the blood just sat on the page like a ruinous smear, before soaking in to the pages.
"This isn't right." Irelia softly spoke to herself, and concentrated, the bead of blood on her finger drying in to a little clump. No matter how much she tried to remember, the period where she had written... something in to her book was gone. She had thought she had forgotten about the ghost, but that wasn't it. Whatever had blocked her memory had done a very good job, perhaps TOO good of a job, because whatever she had learned about her powers were gone. <********." Irelia muttered morosely, staring at the blank pages. She rolled the scab off her finger, and wrote in brilliant scarlet. ******** also bled back in to the pages, and Irelia sighed, knowing that swearing wasn't going to do any good for her. Suddenly, the still air- changed.
Rustling towards her was the same feeling as before, and Irelia stared it down, wriggling her butt in to the sand, trying to cement herself in.
"I am NOT leaving this time, Jonathon."
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Posted: Fri Dec 19, 2008 12:02 am
Two flights up with salty hands, Jacoba also faced down Jonathon: if she had known where Irelia was, she might have gotten a better and more solid idea of the fact that he wasn't quite there -- or at least, he was considering who was the bigger threat. The sheep-girl would have been the more obvious choice, with the faint reek of her locked-away magic: but then again, there was Jacoba, trying to clumsily exorcise one of the ghost-children, raising her threat.
Jace was crouched, still, salt still dripping from her fingers: the outline of the ghost child flickered and dribbled as though it was a dissolving piece of fat. She could not see Jonathon: he was just a kind of miasma in front of her -- an awareness -- and when she felt the flicker that the miasma wasn't quite focused on her, was distracted, she tossed the salt out of her hands -- circled with salt, circled with chalk, she uncapped the pump bottle of holy water and squirted it to the affray. Finally, when she tossed the small metal crucifix at the small dead girl, that did it -- the circle exploded and blurred, the crucifix and its chain melted and warped, the water dried into little curls of white steam. The ghost was gone with something like a sigh.
It was ridiculous. Jack would've been able to banish her with just the chalk. She was bad at exorcisms.
That immediately got Jonathon's attention again -- Jace skidded up and slammed herself into an alcove to her right, which widened out into what revealed itself to be a dingy elevator shaft. With her feet she widened cracks in the grille until the thick cable was revealed to go down to the next floor -- and knowing Jonathan was going to be on her any moment, immediately started shinnying down the rope. She scrabbled down into the darkness, and screamed again:
"IRELIA!"
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Posted: Fri Dec 19, 2008 12:27 am
Prepared for it though she was, the force of the air hitting her was like a storm front, the very air bruising and abusing her still form. Before, she had simply wanted OUT and the wind had obliged. Now faced with the horror of her decision to leave her job unfinished the last time, Irelia was determined to face this fearful presence. She was either too stubborn or not enough of a threat with her odd powers contained, for the air subsided, leaving her bruised and freezing.
Teeth chattering, Irelia crawled towards the two children, and pulled her backpack off, wincing as great drops of clotting blood fell from the swaying boy. His thin voice was only halfway through Ave Maria, but it was losing strength. Spreading her exorcism items on the ground, Irelia looked at them with a critical eye. She had only had a hasty explanation of what to do from Jace, but Irelia wondered how effective they were going to be when she was an Athiest. Jace at least TRIED to be religious. For Irelia, religion had just never come up when speaking to Asher, and she grew up without it. Now that she was older, she was far less likely to believe what she was told to believe.
But hell, she was ready to believe in the god of forks if that would help at all in this situation. Feeling sort of dumb, Irelia circled around the boy with first the chalk, and then the salt, and then threw the water on the boy. Jace might have thought she was bad with exorcisms, but Irelia trumped her.. Nothing happened save for the boy's voice wavering, and an immense pressure began to weigh on her, almost as if the ceiling was coming down.
Irelia hoped the ceiling wasn't coming down. Biting her lip, Irelia tried to touch the boy, with salt and chalk and water covered hands. She just passed through the boy, and he turned to look at her with mournful, dark eyes.
"I'm sorry," Irelia whispered quietly, horrified by her lack of ability to help the poor thing, "I wish I could send you somewhere better, better than this horrible place. I'm so so sorry."
"And lo, with tears dripping from Her face, the child was sent from this plane to another, to be loved like he should have been, away from these horrors of horrors." As the boy faded, his song carried on, lending not eeriness but a sense of peace to the surroundings. A man was walking towards Irelia, his lilting voice carrying a suggestion of familiarity.
Irelia stood up, her hand on her gun.
"Irelia, Irelia, Irelia. You have been a busy thing, haven't you?"
He stood a little ways away, with the air of concerned serenity. Irelia hated him for it, this place called for a little mind numbing panic.
"Who are you?" Irelia disregarded what he said, and pointed the gun on him.
"I'm Clavis you silly thing. We must have a talk. And I think your friend is about to drop in on us."
Irelia's eyes flickered upwards, at the almost unheard call from Jace.
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Posted: Fri Dec 19, 2008 12:39 am
From another part of the basement, there was a clanking, followed by what sounded like a car trying to have make-outs with a gigantic buzzsaw. This was apparently the noise of Jace ripping through the rusted, crapped-out elevator in the basement, fighting with something that was in it, and eventually emerging somewhere near the graveyard that the basement had become with a cut on her lip and a bruise on her forehead -- and when she saw Irelia, she glowed in utter relief.
This was short-lived, as when the redhead saw Clavis, she vaulted over an old gurney to sprint to Irelia's side -- fists raised again as she set her jaw in mortal kombat! defensiveness, not at all the drugged-out and injured child that Clavis had seen before. As she got closer, her expression changed from panic to suspicion, but she still edged next to Irelia with a look of touch her and die, asswipe.
"You okay?" she said out the corner of her mouth; "He's not here any more -- dropped me when I was up the second storey. Who's the creep?"
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Posted: Fri Dec 19, 2008 12:56 am
Irelia took a step closer to the man as the noise reached a cacophony of sound, and he laid a hand on her shoulder comfortably. Which led to a very uncomfortable feeling in her stomach, as she erupted in to a huge, full bodied blush. Which was odd when she was in absolute mortal danger.
When the noise subsided, and Jace appeared, Irelia unceremoniously threw herself on her, hugging her as tightly as possible with one hand, her gun in the other. Reaching down, Irelia grabbed Jace's hand as a matter of course, and turned back towards the man, who was smiling at her sadly. Which was of course, what Clavis did most of the time, though the girl's didn't know that.
"I'm sorry if my presence is shocking to you in here, though I understand that neither of you remember me, which is as it should be. Unfortunately, recent events have urged me to change my mind about leaving you alone, and for that I am sorry."
Clavis took another step towards them, and Irelia shuffled back.
"I know you don't know me from Adam, but do I look dangerous?" Clavis looked about as dangerous as a rabbit, "Sorry for the abruptness of this, but there is no time. The layers of reality in this building are shifting and sufficient time has passed for Asher to have entrance here. We were so busy focusing on where Asher WAS that we neglected to focus on where he wasn't. Nearsighted of us, I'm sorry to say, and I rather wish you'd stop looking at me like that."
Irelia's face was a mosaic of emotions, some sad, some angry. All bewildered.
"Asher? But he's like. In county jail. For abuse charges?" Irelia ended on a question.
Clavis looked towards the heavens silently, and strode towards the girls, slashing the air with his hand and stopping them in their tracks.
"Simply a locking spell, nothing to be alarmed of. I rather wish this particular spell was less. Well, personal but our resident goddess has a bit of the romantics." Clavis mentioned this good naturedly, and leaned down to kiss Irelia on the forehead. But Irelia had twisted herself at the last moment, and he found himself kissing her on the lips.
Irelia didn't know why she had done it, but the sheer feeling of being close to him was doing strange, jittery things to her. The spell was still in effect, and Irelia found herself remembering every horrifying detail, while at the same time suffering tiny happy explosions all over her body. But then things went- sideways.
And somehow, the remembering went further, and there was a snap as she remembered everything. Remembered it all. All the sordid details of the past, and who Asher actually was.
And Irelia wept, amidst the kiss, for all that she had lost before, and for the betrayal she found herself in. To be born again, against her wishes, and to be raised by the very man who had twisted her nature and almost destroyed a section of reality.
Clavis broke away abruptly, his mouth a thin, tight line. Irelia still wept, and Clavis turned to Jace.
"We're not going to have a repeat are we?" Clavis joked, but his heart wasn't in it. Things never went to plan.
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Posted: Fri Dec 19, 2008 1:03 am
Irelia was sobbing like a child whose heart was broken. She had just been in a pretty emphatic liplock with Captain Sad. They were stuck in a basement with the reek of corpses, shallow graves and half-tilled earth mixed up with broken concrete. It was dark.
At least she wasn't afraid any more. Jace was totally fed up and white-hot with an annoyance she couldn't quite understand; it did not take an emotional wizard to read her expression to Clavis as unrelentingly hostile. She wiped a smear of blood off her lip, fists bunched up, and for a moment it looked as though she'd reach out to Rel -- and then stopped.
"Are you going to help out," she demanded, "or are you just here to ******** around?"
She dug around in her pocket: a tissue was roughly stabbed in Irelia's direction, without taking her eyes off Clavis. Jace knew Irelia. Irelia was like a freakin' waterworks, and she meanly couldn't conjure up a word of comfort. -- Why did the guy feel familiar? --
She felt like a d**k; she couldn't help it. "Just pointing out," she added, "the murderous undead guy on the loose, if you're finishing your tea party, whoever you are."
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Posted: Fri Dec 19, 2008 1:16 am
Clavis looked at her with sad, puppy eyes.
"She needed my help, for I hindered her before. You on the other hand don't need any help. But if you want to understand half at least of what she's so broken hearted about, you need me," Clavis inched closer, "You have no idea how much I hate myself right now, alright? Just don't kick me in the unmentionables." Clavis muttered quietly.
Inching even closer, Clavis sort of. Leaned in while trying to keep the rest of his body FAR AWAY, even the most wooden of people could see Jace could probably explode with FIST PUNCHING FURY. And with a twirl of the air around him, Clavis threw the word for kiss at Jace's head and scrambled back comically.
"As I said, it was all Irelia's idea for the memory transfer to be with a kiss, sorry to say. I think she thought it would keep people from using on those who didn't want it. Excluding me, of course. I sort of make a mess of everything, including this place." Clavis started to fade, but stopped as Irelia made a choking noise.
"Why did you let this happen?" The voice echoing from Irelia was Irelia's own just more. GRAND, if it could be said. While soft, it boomed across the graves, disturbing the dust slightly.
"This in particular, or-" Clavis sighed, "To be perfectly honest, I really should have respected your wishes. But it was just too... sad. To leave things as they were, especially in regards to you. Why should Ebony and i get to live happily ever after, and you have to die, to save everything? And then it turns out Asher was not destroyed and well. I have to say I believe i made the right decision, even though I hurt you daily. For that, I cannot say how sorry I am. I torture myself with that decision every moment, and while I hoped that you could have begun anew, things are circular, which I really should have known. As for the moment, I must leave, before I leave a larger tear in this hole of reality. Asher, or at least part of him-we think he divided, as strange as that sounds- is here. For the love of all that is holy, stop what you created here, and leave this forsaken place."
Clavis winked out of existence.
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Posted: Fri Dec 19, 2008 1:27 am
The basement was once more left again in silence. Jace was clutching her head as though the word had somehow seared through her left temple; rubbing it fretfully, eyes closed, as a part of her brain that had closed up fired up its engines once again. She massaged at her horns -- it was a new comforting thing, pressing close to the cool metal stubs at her head -- and when she sighed, she sounded very tired.
For long moments she was back in the library, high as a kite on pain and fear, as people explained to her that Irelia was actually the crux the universe kind of revolved around. There was another memory nagging behind it that she couldn't reach; she gave up, and just sighed again, this time a little more irritable.
The silence was a little sullen and pretty much hugely awkward. Jonathon turning up would have been a boon. Jace wondered vaguely why, suddenly, if the top floor was flooded, the basement was dry as a bone.
"At least my creepy past life exes never turn up," she said.
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Posted: Fri Dec 19, 2008 1:36 am
"The year is young," Irelia said gravelly, wiping her eyes on her sleeve. It sucked, finally figuring out pretty much all the questions she had had before and then having more questions raised by the answers. So what, she had a life before this one. That's a lot of information and Irelia didn't all of a sudden know it all. Just the important bits. She suddenly felt a thousand years older and yet still the same. It wasn't like there were two of her, she was essentially the same person which was probably why Clavis was still mooning over her.
Irelia threw the gun on the ground, followed by her knives, the exorcism items and all the other odds and ends in her backpack. Followed by her backpack. Seeing Jace's quizzical look, Irelia shrugged.
"Don't need them," Irelia said, in a sort of badass way. Then she waffled, "Well, I mean, I don't think I do...."
As if the room had heard Jace's mental query, the room began to leak.
"That's... probably not good."
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Posted: Fri Dec 19, 2008 2:36 am
Maybe she didn't need them, but Jace was surreptitiously picking up everything -- safety on the gun, too -- before she caught sight of the little girl, rather than the dripping that was coming from the ceiling. Dying in a flood was one thing; another little ghost was -- it wasn't a ghost at all.
"Holy s**t," she said, momentarily distracted from Irelia and her past-life squeezes, "she's not dead, Rel -- damn, what's going on around here?"
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Posted: Fri Dec 19, 2008 2:46 am
Irelia hadn't noticed the girl, but turned when Jace exclaimed about it. And she was right, the tiny thing WAS moving. Swooping down, Irelia scooped her up, the white of her ridiculous dress shining in the darkness. Blonde, curly hair, delicate features, VERY tiny... Irelia was flabbergasted. She didn't look REAL, at least, not like a normal person. She looked better than real, and was shockingly beautiful. She looked fine, but whimpered with a weird sound, a low keening that wasn't really... human.
"I guess we've got to take her with us," Irelia said, shifting the girl in to the crook of her arm, and picked up her book, "Too bad this area is so muddied with his reality, otherwise he'd be easy to tear from this plane. It'll take me awhile to figure him out, and i think there is perhaps a bit of ghost in him. Or demon, I'm not sure. I mean, I can't do anything about THAT, i didn't create that bit. I totally still need your help."
Irelia looked at Jace with pleading eyes. She might be a goddess on another plane but DAMMIT, she just wanted to be a normal kid on this one. Friends with Jace, badass to the stars.
"And um, Jace. That kiss sorta totally didn't mean anything. I mean, not anymore. That was sorta past me being a conniving b***h."
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Posted: Mon Dec 22, 2008 12:11 am
There was a tension in Jace's shoulders, but -- knowing too well their bitchfights of before -- she swung around to give Irelia a lopsided grin; shoving the gun unwisely down the front of her shorts, where it would ostensibly go off and do unhappy things to her pelvis, raising the flickering beam of the torch again around them. The elevator was no way up. She picked her way past the grave and a concrete block structure that was -- as they made their way past -- a crematorium; ashes and cremains spilled out of the front of the oven and into a filthy, dirty pool on the floor, where trickles from the roof made it a sooty puddle.
"Yeah, yeah," she said, "You can make out with who you like; I'm no dateblocking keeper, cupcake, I'm not going to be one of those disapproving a** friends who pulls that crap. You're my -- well, whatever, you're my conniving b***h, however many chicks you got in your head."
There was a noise of rushing water over head. The ground sank beneath their feet; there was the light of a broken wall up ahead, thin and grey, and they made their way towards it. "When all else fails," she said, "just beat the s**t out of it."
Jace sounded more cheerful than she felt.
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Posted: Mon Dec 22, 2008 12:33 am
Irelia was worried that their freshly discovered friendship was about to go up in smoke. To be perfectly honest, Irelia was happy that she had forced Clavis to bridge the gap between this life and the last; now she was totally aware of what sort of a ******** that Asher was.
Unfortunately, it was giving her a massive headache, and she slowly wrote symbols in her mind, locking and shutting down any information she did not need at that very moment in the back of her mind. Such as adult conversations and past angers, jealousies, hurts; things that wouldn't make any difference to her this time around. She was left feeling like herself again, the self she had known her whole life.
Jogging to catch up, one hand around the baby, Irelia threw her free arm around Jace's shoulder.
"I really screw things up all the time don't I?"
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Posted: Mon Dec 22, 2008 2:23 am
Jace snaked her arm around Irelia's shoulder; briefly, very briefly, her fingers wound their way up the back of Irelia's neck, into the curls at the nape -- all of the sheep-girl's heavy dark hair, wound into ringlets, that they'd scraped away from her head to give her some mobility. Then her hand was gone and she was giving that faint lopsided grin again: "Shut up," she said, and they continued on into the darkness.
The light was one of the basement walls broken, down underneath the foundations of the asylum; they both crawled through it, and then up again into what was a broken-down stairwell, obviously going to the first floor. The steps were splashing with running water, down seeping into the soil beneath the place.
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Posted: Sun Dec 28, 2008 12:22 am
The first floor stunk, same as it always had, and they made it past the oblique splashing without a concerned glance. Irelia's heart was still pumping like mad, but the worst fears were the things you hadn't faced, and splosh sounds were old hat to them.
But the second floor was still half blocked off, and though the strange black blobs were nowhere to be seen, those too would have been more welcome than the yawning blackness of the rooms to come.
Squeezing Jace's hand, Irelia moved forward, past the numerous broken beds and their gallows and in to another room. A room that they had never been in. A room also filled with beds.
Tiny, tiny beds.
Scrapes along the floorboards showed that the beds weren't always in the semicircle in the middle of the floor, the deep ridges in the wood stained with rust and other unidentified stains. The beds, all of them in rather good condition, with stained bedsheets somewhat intact, were all filled, save for two places, though indentations in the matress showed that there had once been two other souls.
The children in the beds varied in age, from between 2 to 11 or so, and most of them were pale, almost ghostly, as if they weren't even really there. Less so than the other kids they had run in to.
Save for two of them, twins, who turned towards Irelia and Jace as they entered the room. Suddenly, there was a scraping noise, and an old broken graphaphone, rusting on the floor, began to play a scratchy rendition of mary had a little lamb. The twins grinned, ripped black mouths yawing as their heads tipped back unnaturally, and millions of spiders appeared.
Forgetting her newfound deity status, Irelia shrieked despite herself.
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