[ PRP ] What is your [Mark, Rep ]

[Baneful]

Rep had set up a steady mantra of ShitShitShitShitShit as he hurried as much as possible along the corridor, dripping blood behind him as he went. The place seemed like a research facility and the weird parallels between there and the life labs just made it even more worrying that he'd been brought there. The life labs weren't a great place to be as a subject and it looked like here he'd have been one.

He didn't look long at the room with the examination table, but managed to catch a glimpse of the second room. For a moment he considered diving for the phone but he needed every footstep for survival and the idea of getting cornered in a room with whatever was behind him was a horrible prospect.

So he left it behind, just running as much as he could run while clutching his side and trying not to lose any more of his precious blood. He wanted to call out to see if anyone else was here, if anyone was even ******** alive, but terror seemed to have its talons around his throat and he couldn't find his voice.

STAMINA - 39
 

[Zoobey]

What started first as a subtle ringing in Rep's ears was now a shrill roar throbbing every waking second. A tiredness was beginning to seep into him, even simple, menial motions difficult and challenging as the corners of his vision narrowed drastically.

The bleeding was not stopping.

And neither was the pulsing of something behind him, or was that simply his ears still ringing? Was that the feeling of something - shadows - snapping at his ankles, pulling him backwards, or was he simply too tired to move on his own?

He passed by a third and fourth room. Both rooms were empty. So was the fifth room-

- With the exception of the Death Lead extracting something from a very recently deceased uniformed person.

Baneful

 

[Baneful]

He knew it was urgent, even without having Tracey tell him it was, feeling nauseous as he bled, the weariness making him dizzy and threatened to pull him down. The only thing that fought it off was the terrified and equally dizzying thrum of adrenaline that promised him in no uncertain terms that if he went down he would never ever get back up again.

Whatever it was felt right behind him, and it too seemed to just want him to stop. He didn't know where he was going, it was almost hopeless, room after empty room. What could he find that would even help him now? There was ******** nothing, he was probably a hundred miles from anyone friendly and he'd never get back home.

Seeing Caelius was almost painful, knowing that even though the other man was from Deus that his allegiance was to himself. He held no ground, no room to bargain for help with him any more than he could bargain with one of the uniformed hunters. He stopped in the doorframe, leaning against it to try and steel the dizziness.

"Might not be able to finish this mission boss." he said, looking at his hand, soaked and dripping with blood with a distant ticking sound against the floor. "On account of being dead."

STAMINA - 30
 

[Zoobey]

Caelius took one look at Rep-

- and left without another word. There was no Mark this time to save Rep, and it was entirely questionable whether or not the other Hunters were even alive in any shape or state.

The floor collapsed, or rather, Rep fell uncontrollably onto the floor. Something was notably dragging his feet, but this time backwards. His heart began to pound faster, adrenaline - fear - rushing in as the eyes focused, all hundreds of him on their singular prey.

They were hungry and he could hear them now, a mass of forms and voices, some tantalizingly familiar, others distant. They clawed at his paranoia and promised him peace at last, promised him sleep and deliverance and-

"Get the ******** up."

Unlike a certain Disney movie, the Death lead didn't insist more than once.

Baneful

 

[Baneful]

Rep was so hazy with blood loss that he wasn't sure where he was or what he was doing, when the irresistible force pulled him to the floor, it was almost a relief. He wasn't going to make it back, and the fear brought with it a kick of panic as he thought about Harrison and the fact that he'd probably never even hear what happened to him.

It would be easy to sleep, it would be easy to give in though, to get rid of this ache in him and the sense of helplessness. It would be so, so easy.

But that would mean ignoring a direct order.

Ordered to stand, he tried very hard to do so, even in the face of every instinct and thought that pushed him to do the exact opposite.


STAMINA - 21  

[WE ARE HALLOWEEN]

The shadows would not have him leave however, the strange intangible mess of limbs and voices and eyes that forced Rep down and dragged him further and further away-

- For a second it was just shadows. It felt like when he had been swallowed by the cobra-hybrid magnified a hundred times. It felt like he was sinking and sinking and sinking, only a gaping maw of a million teeth and eyes below him waiting to snap him up-

- And then the smell of cauterizing flesh and a numb pain that began to burn and then sear along his side. The reaction escalated, his body involuntarily thrashing. Someone was holding Rep down with enough force to leave his body grooved into the floor.

The sharp pain, the hissing stopped, and so did the bleeding. It still hurt, it felt like his side were mutilated more now than before, but it was a strange dull throb.

The shadows had disappeared entirely behind him, leaving only the retreating figure of the Death lead holding one runic dagger. The eternal hallway lights were flaring now, an abrupt red-orange and there were the sounds of more footsteps coming their way.

Baneful

Stamina roll is 1d6 now
More ??? have shown up! If Rep has a runic weapon he can attack them with their base mechanics.

 

[Baneful]

He felt like a failure, losing a battle of wills with himself, with whatever it was that wanted him to stop. He was going to die but at this point it was probably fine, he felt like he'd lived a hundred thousand lifetimes, the sharpest and clearest those of that blue self and of the strange ancient who'd known Duty as a friend.

But he resurfaced just in time to realise through the haze of pain and aching muscles that he was alive, that he was awake, alive enough to keep going, no longer bleeding as heavily as he was, able to keep going.

He didn't allow himself for a goddamn second to think that Cael had possibly saved his a**, not one second, because thinking it would potentially just make it cease to be the case. Instead he pulled himself breathlessly to his feet and tried to follow Cael as expediently as he could.



STAMINA - 18  

[WE ARE HALLOWEEN]

A second later, alarms, actual alert sirens began to blare loudly. They passed by another set of doors without much incident, until they hit a locked elevator, guarded by what it seemed like a 6 digit security code.

Caelius walked over, paused briefly, and entered 1-2-3-4-5-6 and then waited.

Dead silence save the alarms in the background. Surely nobody was stupid enough to actually make that their key code, and given how bad the Death lead was with anything beyond the 1800s-

- Surprisingly the elevator dinged and opened. Inside were about five armed people in grey uniforms. All five of them took a look at Caelius and Rep-

- And immediately tried their best to shut the elevator doors closed, shouting wildly about closing it before it was too late while another fired their weapon just as wildly at them.

About two minutes later everyone was decidedly dead, leaving Rep a wide array of runic weapons from guns to tasers to a good old-fashioned dagger to play with. They were still glowing an odd red as the elevator began its ascent one-hundred floors from the basement of where they were into ground floor.

Baneful

 

[Baneful]

There was a moment, when Cael entered that particular number on the keypad that Rep almost lost it and devolved into hysterical laughter, the accumulated terror and insanity of his last few hours threatening to bubble over into something involuntary. It was the sheer respect he had for his boss and his own survival that made him grit his goddamn teeth as hard as he ******** could and absolutely not laugh like a champ.

The murder was prompt, Rep himself keeping mostly out of the way, aware he was unarmed, wounded and a liability, but as he found himself faced with a lot of s**t. A LOT of s**t to pick from, he did what a hoarder would do.

He took every ******** thing they had with the nimble fingered efficiency and deep (blood soaked) pockets expected of someone who had a cave filled with absolute nightmares on the island. Of all of the things he had though, he fished out the dagger to keep immediately to hand, used to it from all the times he'd been cuffed and a ******** dagger had been his only friend in all the world.

It was probably his only friend in the world right now, he thought as he braced himself against the side of the lift with his free hand..

"Thanks." he said vaguely as they went, in a way that might as well have been him saying it to nobody. Definitely not the only other person in the elevator.


STAMINA : 13  

[WE ARE HALLOWEEN]

So there they were, three live guys and four dead guys in an elevator. It was a very slow ride up and it wasn't until twenty floors in that the obligatoey elevator music finally started playing.

The third guy was still playing dead. Occassionally he would open one eye and search around for any available weapons. It seemed the Death lead hadn't noticed him either, busy scanning a collection of files that looked similar in format to the ones Rep had passed by. They were simply labelled "GR-104-2" and "GR-104-3".

Baneful

 

[Baneful]

Rep was eyeing the guys on the floor as he tried to steady himself. He was still feeling Not Great and even the sealing of his injuries had simply slowed rather than stopped the bleeding and that without Tracey he still probably needed some attention in an actual human hospital to even get better.

He tried not to think about it.

One of the guys looked like he was breathing, but Rep didn't trust his own hazy mind right now enough to bring it up, instead just trying to ignore the ******** that's annoying." he said weakly, if he was going to go to his death he would have preferred it to something that didn't sound like it had come off of one of Coldplay's new albums.


STAMINA 8  

[WE ARE HALLOWEEN]

The elevator finally opened with a gentle ding like some oversized microwave. A couple of things simultaneously happened:

As the door opened, the third live occupant in the room tried to make a break for it, attempting to yank Rep's weapon out of his working arm. A split second later he had something buried straight in his throat, he was gagging and struggling and spraying almost more blood than Rep's exsanguination attempts. The body continued to struggle as it fell prompty against Rep, just as Mark, waiting on the other side of the doors got splashed with all sorts of victim.

The entire elevator looked like something straight out of Carrie as the Prom Queen himself walked out, cleaned his glasses on the inside of his coat and retrieved his missing dagger.

Mark stood stiffly, waiting for Caelius to leave before grabbing a hold of Rep accidentally by the dislocated arm, propping him onto his shoulders. "I got you buddy, let's get out of here."

Baneful

 

[Baneful]

Rep was admittedly pretty glad that Cael was there and that he didn't have to try and finish the guy off either, not sure that he even had the strength in him to murder someone right then and there. At the very least the blood didn't bother him, used to slaughtering animals and god knew what else. It was less gross on the scale of nope than the undying, more human than anything else.

The redhead was so out of it as he leaned gratefully against Mark that he barely registered it was his bad arm, only yelping a little and moving to switch to the other side with a vague sort of comment.

"That arm is ********. Dragged by it." he said.


STAMINA - 2  

[Zoobey]

"Dude," Mark began, as it rained explosives all around them and the building began to crumble. Since Caelius was striding in front of them it just looked like he was dramatically walking away into the sunlight while explosions fired behind them, "You don't even want to know what I had to do to find you guys, this place is a freaking maze. First, like I went to the wrong floor, and then I had to find access to the elevators to the other floors. So I went to the second floor to try and get access, and it was the freaking administration floor, so I then I had to take the service chute and - are you even listening-"

It was kind of hard to listen when an entire building seemed to be about ready to collapse around them, though in a moment of fortuitous luck, they managed to pulled though.

"By the way," the Death assistant continued once they were out into the ridiculous bright sunlight of a thousand tropical degrees, "I have something for you, I found it while I was trying to find the elevator control panel, where did I put it."

He fished around in his pockets just short of the portal.

'Baneful

 

[Baneful]

"It was a ******** nightmare down there." And he still had not a damn clue what the dark thing had been or if it had only been in his mind. The building blowing up seemed like something far away as he was forced to put more and more of his weight on Mark's shoulders, grudging every bit of dependence on others as a burden even as he did so. The fact of the matter was that he kept drifting in and out of conciousness and wasn't sure how much longer he could hold on.

Still even in the face of all that he seemed interested in what Mark had, in the delirium of blood loss losing grip of what priorities even were.

He still couldn't hear Tracey.

"Wha'issit" he said.

Stamina 1