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Reacting quickly, America yanked Stryker back to her and began to dodge the crumbling wreckage of the Guardian. As the dust settled,  she stood panting for a moment before turning to Taym, expression bright and heedless of the fog. The girl never noticed the grey creeping up her body, so caught up in her excitement to ask if he'd seen that and wasn't she so cool?

The question froze on America's lips as every bit of life and vibrancy was consumed by stone.

"ZANTHVOS I WILL KILL YOU WITH MY BARE HANDS" He shouted, and he would have, but sadly his hands were petrified now.

OOC

Name of character: Jason Kenneth
Faction: Deus Ex - Moon intermediate trainee
HP: 36
Roll: 2

When his legs began to petrify as well, Jason nearly screamed, trying to move his arms and legs now in hopes that would somehow get rid of the grey stone that was forming.

And somehow it did. The grey crumbled and fell away like rock, leaving him tired, but at least not a stone statue.

He then moved away from the area before someone else could turn him into a statue.

[Exit!]

[Entering]

The battle that was tearing the horsemen apart was not her battle. Not really. Hadiyya would let them tear themselves apart, because who was she to stand between them? All she really wanted was to return home. To find Marosa again, and curl up against his warmth in a nest of blankets.

But how did they get home?

When she arrived the sight of the dragon was enough to stop her temporarily in her tracks, and she stared up at that beast with wide, glowing eyes. Then the statues drew her gaze, and the sight of them speed her pulse. They were not one more strange feature of this tower, but hunters, and students, that had fallen to... To what?

It reminded her of Riley, of the terrible fate that had befallen one of her oldest friends. The thought alone had her cringing, but she would not back down.

Water came to her hands, forming an amorphous orb between dark fingers, and she would shatter that whole, sending the smaller beads of water towards the guardian like tiny, translucent bullets.

All he'd had time for before he was swallowed up was a strangely-hollow moment in which he watched America's words frozen, her face crawling over with stone, and then silence. No dramatic calling-out of her name or sudden waves of grief, just a dim, tired awareness that ran along the lines of so her too, already before even that was taken.

A little road opened up in front of him. Not a road: a corridor, a path, modest and unpromising, and he walked down it for lack of anything better to do, and sat down in the chair he found at the end of it for the same reason, numb and unfeeling. The sudden population of the dark with a cloth-draped table was unaccompanied by wonder.

"Well," April said, "did you figure out what you want for dessert?"

He paused. "Did you die too, then?" he asked flatly.

"You look tired, honey."

"I am."

He looked at her in silence, at the dark-dyed curls and too much makeup and the tacky tattoo on the inside of her wrist. He tried to find Tuesday in her face, but everyone had always said that Tuesday looked just like him, so much like him, and he in turn had always looked just like his mother. He wondered if his father had ever searched through his face for some whisper of his parentage, if maybe he'd found an odd pride or, given what kind of son Taym was, a dim shame in Taym's inability to eradicate a constant stubble and the shape of his hairline, the only two things, it seemed, he'd given him. Maybe if April looked at Tuesday now, now that she wasn't just a wrinkled, red baby face, she would be disappointed to see how little of her own face looked back. Maybe she would be relieved. He was about to ask.

"Dessert, honey. Focus," she said, without looking up from the menu. "I'm stuck between the chocolate cake and the creme brulee."

"So I am dead, then?"

"Of course."

"So are you?"

Silence.

"I figured it'd be mom here, or Tuesday. Or dad. Or Harley. No offense, but I kinda thought we were as done as it was possible to be."

"Oh," she said, looking up finally, "we are." Her hair fell carefully, as it always did, over her bad eye; her voice was sweetly slurred and maybe it was hard to follow at first but he'd had a long time to grow accustomed to it, and he understood her perfectly. He understood her words perfectly. He'd never understood her at all. She was, he realized with a pang, just as pretty without the fog of infatuation clouding his judgment as she had been with it. Prettier, maybe: more human, more real. "This isn't about me."

"I wish you wouldn't put so much makeup on over your freckles."

"You wished I'd do a lot of things, Taym, but they aren't your freckles even if you liked to think of them that way."

"So why you? Why not dad?" He glanced down at the menu, at the elegant, sparse typesetting that swam as it did in dreams and revealed nothing: no cake, no creme bulee, nothing.

"She is very beautiful," said April calmly.

"Not as pretty as you are," he answered, without emotion. "But yeah. You'd like her, I think."

"See, this is why me. You've got to stop doing this s**t, honey, it's bad for you."

"Doing what s**t?"

"Getting your hooks in. You came to the Island with goals, right? And so, OK, the dying goal--good work on that--keeps not panning out, so maybe you have to modify accordingly, but that doesn't give you license to fall in love with every pretty girl who gives you the time of day. She isn't yours. You have to stop acting like people become yours just because you're comfortable around them. It's ******** up."

"Does it matter? I mean, I'm dead. Bit late."

"Oh, honey. You've died before. It's OK. Are you going to pick a dessert?"

"I assume there's no cake with little mushrooms on top," he said bitterly.

"Yeah, see, that's exactly what I mean. This is sad, honey. It's sad and it's pathetic. She's eighteen years old, you keep forgetting it. You gotta stop projecting all this s**t onto her. She isn't some idol of personal stability, sweetheart, just like I wasn't. If you couldn't figure out your s**t in the real world for the sake of a baby you adored--and I couldn't either, no judgment here, just sayin'--how are you going to figure it out for the sake of a girl you barely know, in a world where you not-infrequently die and sometimes have hallucinated conversations with figures from your past? You and stability, honey, you are not friends."

"I'd... I'd make her happy."

"No, you wouldn't. You didn't make me happy, either, even though you promised. You don't just get to say it and worship some inflated idea of us and pretend your work is done. You can't even make yourself happy, Taym. Anyway, I hope you are smart enough to realize this isn't a conversation about America Jones."

"I know."

"OK, good. Well then, since you apparently don't want dessert--and you need to eat, sweetheart, look at you--I'll just ask whether you want to go or not."

"Go?"

"Yes. Back, I mean."

He paused for a long time. "So the option is to make it real this time, or not?"

"It's to stay here or not stay here. I don't have a lot of information to go on, here. I'm just a figment of your imagination. I'm reading off a script. I think I'll have the creme brulee," she added absently.

"I want to go back."

"You don't want to die?"

"No."

"OK, then." Without looking up from the menu, she pointed back the way he'd come. "It was nice seeing you."

"What about... so that's it? Just tell me that I need to stop trying to... to find something stable, send me on my way?"

"What do you want? A kiss? A farewell? A moment of enlightment?"

"No. This isn't about you."

"Exactly."

"You're just--the shape it happened to take. Because I was looking at her, when I..."

"When you died. Yes, exactly. Smart boy."

He sat at the table in frustrated silence, tapping the corner of the menu against the table.

"I don't want to spend the rest of my ******** life... living just... I don't want this. I don't want a bunch of days laid end to end. I don't want this. I just want everything to be boring. I want to be... I want to be able to be happy with everything boring," he amended, because he never was. He craved monotony and when he had it spent all his time evading it.

"So stay here."

"No. I don't want that either. I want--"

"You want what you can't have, honey, and that's how it's always been. You can't have people, and maybe you need to stop equating having people with having a future, anyway. That's not how the world works. You can have yourself, and that's it. Maybe work on that."

Another long silence. He put the menu down, and pushed back his chair.

"This creme brulee is phenomenal," she informed him as he turned.

"I don't love you," he said.

"I know. It's fine. We were very young. This isn't about me."

And he left.

He thought he had escaped it. He thought he had won at least some small battle. But in one quickly enveloping moment he was swept away. To weak to fight it now.

So he let it come. Not that he had much of a choice in the matter anyway.

Suddenly he was standing. No longer on the ground, the weakness for the most part had gone as well. But still he didn't feel right. A path lay in front of him leading forward. He supposed he had no choice in this matter either. As he reached the end the setting shifted. It was slightly familiar, perhaps it was his mind trying to ease his self into this reality of death.

Zascha sat in a chair, slumping his shoulders. Looking at his gloved hands.

"Have you figured out what you want for dessert?"

Green eyes widened as he slowly lifted his head to view the person across from him. Tiny pale hands grasped a menu too large to see her face, but he knew who it was. As the menu came down he was assaulted with smooth pale skin and long dark curls. Bright green eyes like his own only with tiny flecks of gold, large and round. "Have you figured out what you want for dessert big brother?"

"Merina...." His voice caught in his throat. No, not like this. He wasn't ready to face this. If she was here then...

"I thought you liked the desserts here Zash now you're making me think that I bothered you to bring me here." She puffed out her cheeks and glared at him.

He couldn't look at her, if he looked she wasn't really there right?

Merina let out a squeaky sigh as she kicked her legs under the table before giving him a good whack to the knee. "Come on Zash its not that bad. Just pick a dessert and stay here with me. You look so sad what's the point of going back if it makes you sad all the time? You can fool others but you can't fool me I know you too well." It felt as if her eyes were burning a hole through his soul.

Finally he looked at her straight on, tears lingering in the corner of his eyes as he grasped her tiny hand from across the table. Squeezing it tightly, it felt so real but he knew, he knew this wasn't real. A determined look came to his face as his eyebrows furrowed, staring the Merina specter in the eyes. It was hard to do but he had to do it. "I go back so that you and Marta and Anna and Brie don't die in vain. I go back so that I can find the monster that took you from me and tear him to pieces with my own bare hands."

Merina looked scared, she pulled her hand back. "So you go back for revenge?"

"No, Merina. I go back for closure. And if I die at the end then so be it. No one will miss me." He frowned. "I've only just started and I cannot leave that world now. Not like this." Standing up from the table, he pushed the chair back with the back of his legs before moving around to the other side where his little sister sat. Leaning down to kiss her on top of the head like he had always done before leaving the house. "Just wait for me. And when I come back we'll have all the desserts you want." He ran his hair through her dark brown curls before stepping away from the table.

Not turning around as he left for fear that just one more look at her would cause him to break and change his mind.

[ Hamika & Phymi ]

Well this was great. Hamika had died, unable to do anything, while Phymi ran wild and attacked her own. At least she was out of the mirror now, she guessed. Not that it helped much, to be honest. She sighed. If only she'd been loyal to someone, to anyone, she wouldn't have ended up controlled by Phymi. Though, it confused her why Phymi became her alter ego. She'd thought the puppet had died when Grief consumed it.

She had gone through the door of Grief though.

She sighed and walked up the path. A chair, really? What was she going to do with a chair?

"Dessert?"

She blinked and looked at Phymi who sat in the opposite chair eating... eye scream? "You really should try some of this eye scream." Her doppleganger, who was not shadowy but still bared the resemblance of a horseman, spooned a section of the cold substance into her mouth and methodically chewed. Hamika raised an eyebrow at her before sitting in the chair.

"Eye scream?" offered the puppet. Hamika pulled her bag up onto the table and fished around for her journal.

"Why are you messing with that? Eat some dessert. Stay. It's much better than worrying about the living world, isn't it?" The comment caught Hamika off guard and she stared at her doppleganger. But she had people to meet outside. She had a hat to get back even!

"I have things to do." Phymi shrugged.

"But what if you fail again? Like you did in Wonderland? Aren't you the Ancient of Worthlessness?" jabbed the other with a smirk. Hamika jolted a little and tug her fingers into her palms. No. That wasn't the point of being the Ancient of Worthlessness.

She meant something as that Ancient. She wasn't just a face in the crowd. She was something greater, something more powerful. Phymi missed the point entirely. She was born out of worthless. She may have fallen to worthlessness, but she rose above, became it, let herself be consumed by it. Become consumed by it made it that much more powerful.

She didn't run from her worthlessness, she accepted it and owned it.

"No. I'm the Ancient of Worthlessness because I accepted my own worthlessness. There's a difference."

"Well, you're dead. We're dead, really." Another bite of eye scream went into her mouth.

"I know. And as much as I'd love some eye scream, they need all the help they can get."

"When you're controlled by me? Fat chance. " Hamika chuckled and stood up from the table. Phymi really was insistent of her incompetence wasn't she? She ran a hand through her hair and turned back towards the path that had lead her here.

"I never said who'd I'd be helping, Phymi. C'mon, we got hunters to kill," she said without turning. She didn't bother wondering if the other would follow her.

There was something she had to do.