Welcome to Gaia! ::

Nine didn't have time to respond and talk to the others as they appeared out of nowhere. She wasn't sure where they had come from, but they looked slightly familiar, as though they had just gone through the same sort of thing she had and were now dead as well.

Dead. Huh, funny, she didn't imagine it to be much like this at all.

Nine slowly drifted into a daze, thinking about the events so far on this retched island. A slight tugging pulled at her mind, she couldn't place what it was, it was just a... feeling. But before long it was searing pain, cutting through her mind like a chainsaw through a butter sculpture. And damn did it hurt.

It kept going, and was almost completely through her mind when a new... feeling came over her. This one she could place much more easily, this one was not foreign to her at all. Revenge. She wasn't ready to be dead, and someone would have to pay for it.

She must go back. She must kill as many of them as she could. She must make a new team. One that would go on the offensive. One that would kill.

Oh how he wished E4 would just stop shaking him already. If this continued he was sure his head would roll off his shoulders, or he would be thrown in to some kind of coma of some sort. Was this the start of it though? This weird tugging pain in his head. Maybe dizziness or a headache was starting to form. No, not it didn't feel like that, it was more...painful. Damn it hurt!

Gritting his teeth, E8 pushed away from E4 and immediately his hands clung to his aching head. Yes, this was no headache. No headache would hurt so much it would make him wish he was dead, or dead again. Death after death if that made any sense.

That feeling soon dissipated though and was replaced with a feeling of revenge. Revenge that was just heightened by the adrenaline pumping through his viens. He needed to return. He needed to get all his anger out by slashing somebody or something.

Oh yes, he would return with a vengeance. He would carry on. He would make it to the end if it was the last thing he did.

'I have to go back and stand by them....'

The sensation came as a shock to ε IX. She had concluded that this was it. She was dead, right? Isn't that the end of the line? The mixed emotions washed through her, confounding and unsettling all at once. She was afraid, not just of the invasion of emotion from somewhere, but of the unknown. What would happen now? What had happened before? She was in limbo in so many ways, she realized, no past and a future so thoroughly veiled that she couldn't imagine what it would be like tomorrow.

Add to that maelstrom of emotion and racing thought the new (physical?) pain and ε IX was flattened to her place on the couch. Her mind whirled with the agonizing pain of her body as a flood of memories from the last days crowded in. She remembered waking in the tent, discovering her teammates, the battle against the others before the horse-beast. The memories continued, unbidden and unstoppable, a parade of sensations from her short life.

The one that lingered the longest was more recent, of the medic who took the time to care for her wounds when she thought no one would care. It had been a turning point, a time when someone took notice of her and gave her aid without asking for anything in return. The relentless march of memory continued onward, playing through the minesweeper game and up to the point of her demise. She shivered involuntarily as she relived the last moments of surprise and pain.

I wasn't done! The thought was an anguished cry inside of her, bubbling up from somewhere deep inside. She hadn't thought she cared, and yet... She did. She wanted to go back. She MUST go back. Her teammates still needed her protection and help. She needed theirs as well if she was ever to discover her past, her purpose. There was a reason behind all this and she felt a burning, consuming need to find out what it was, despite the crushing pain and the torrent of memories and emotions that was sending her mind reeling.

ε IX lay back on the couch, feeling strangely spent. "What the hell was that?" she muttered, the tension she felt creeping into her voice as she spoke. She drew herself in, pulling her legs up onto the couch and wrapping her arms around them, her chin resting on her knees. She felt vulnerable and strange. Had that been her? Had the others felt the same thing or was she going crazy, alone? Although distant, the memory of the seething, vile monstrosity that had possessed (or was) her made her shudder.

Hoping to distract herself from her inner thoughts and disturbances, she glanced around the room to see what the others were up to.

There was one less.

She got up stiffly, jerkily, in a tangle of limbs all trying to move at once and pointed at where Delta Eleven had been. "Gone? Eleven is gone?" The disappearance of a member of their little gaggle unsettled her nearly as much as the fit or whatever it was that had just happened. She was surprised at herself that she cared, to be honest. She hadn't really even had a chance to get to know that one, and it wasn't like it was a team member. And yet... Had one of them been claimed again? If they were already dead, what could have happened to that poor soul?

The outpouring of emotion felt strange. Although many of the emotions she had been feeling of late were not necessarily good, she was feeling something. She was still human enough then, right? These thoughts were in the back of her mind as she stared at the empty place in confusion and horror. Her current state paled in comparison to the oddly disconnected memory of the monsters, but it was distressing nonetheless.

With an uncharacteristic whimper, ε IX curled back onto the couch with a cushion in her arms, the substance of the thing giving comfort on some primal level.

Her eyes were squeezed shut as she hugged her legs to her chest, maintaining the fetal position she found herself adopting; what is this pain? This emotion tugging at her...? Can a dead person even feel this much pain? Then again, it was all mental, right? Her eyes fluttered open and the first thing she saw was something black, flickering - and when she uncurled herself, she realized, to her horror, that the black thing was her. Quickly, she looked up with wide eyes; she hadn't been frightened during her time on the island...

... At least, not until now. Seemed like death had a way of messing with her head.

Breathing heavily under her mask as she gritted her teeth, she soon found that her thoughts of regret had morphed into thoughts filled with hatred. She shouldn't have been the one to die! It was all this stupid island's fault - it was her lousy group's fault. It was everyone else's fault but her own.

She found herself surrounded by what looked to her like black smoke, the type to be generated by a raging inferno. However, unlike smoke, the smoke had form - claws here, fangs there... Where are all the people? Were they all turning into monsters? Could this be the 'shadows' the text talked about? Not daring to breathe, Beta Seven found herself drowning in this black smoke, and she clawed at her gas mask, resisting the urge to scream again, although this time, her scream would be one of rage, not of fear.

And then it was all over.

A gasp escaped her as she flung herself forward so violently, it felt like she had been falling. Was it all a nightmare? It felt like she had just woken up from one... She glanced around the room with a frown, her heart - if it was still beating - was racing. Looking up as one of them spoke (E-9), she did a mental headcount, and realized that yes, one of them was indeed missing.

"... I wonder," Her voice lacked its usual edge, and instead, sounded shaky as she answered E-4, "Sounds like another unanswered question to me... So, that was no nightmare..."

E-12’s vision was red and black smoke tendrils curled around her body. She wasn’t supposed to be dead yet! She would make someone pay for her death! With an unnatural growl, E-12 reached out with an arm tipped in wicked claws, searching for her prey. She snarled and revealed dripping, gruesome fangs. Her eyes rolled wildly in her head and then-

-it was all gone. E-12 gasped. Was that real? The pain, the anger, the ... transformation, it had all seemed so real just a moment ago, but with each passing moment things seemed less like reality.

With wide eyes E-12 scanned the rest of the room. Everyone else seemed to be recovering from the same whatever it was that she was. Her brow furrowed when E-9 spoke up. Delta Eleven? She couldn’t put a face to a name.

“I don’t know, E-4” she whispered. E-12 had no idea if she was okay. She had no idea if she would ever be okay again. They were all dead, right? Where were the others? Where were E-3, B-5 and, E-12 shuddered, B-1? Maybe this was some sort of waiting room. Maybe the real heaven or hell (Probably hell, E-12 thought, bitterly remembering the feeling of her knife as it sank into B-1’s breast) was yet to come.

She cleared her throat. “So, what happens now?”

The regret twisted into anger and unseething hatred. And then... it was all gone.

Snapping awake, yII quickly looked around, breathing heavily like he had just come out of some horrid nightmare. Those emotions... what were they all about? What was that dark mist too? His body was normal... or at least as normal as he knew it to be and he wasn't some twisted beast.

Placing a hand on his head as he tried to recollect himself, he soon took a few breaths and looked towards the others. One of them was missing.

"Who knows what happens to dead people? It's not like people really get to talk to them normally," he said in reply to yI.

There was one thing, though about this place.

"Though, I gotta say. For purgatory, this place is pretty empty," he commented. The only people he saw here were from the island. There were no other dead souls. That struck him as a little odd.