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 Posted: Wed Mar 23, 2016 8:21 pm
"I've got no weapons, love," Autumn said, softening her voice any more. It was a trick she'd learned- low voice, soft words. No aggressive stances, no tension. She just wanted to go home. Slowly, freeing her other hand from Chris's, she took off her purse and lowered it to the ground, then raised both hands in the air. If they were shaking? It was a trick of the light. Really. She was completely, totally cool.
"See? I'm not gonna hurt you. Nobody is," she said, then turned to nod-back at Jeremiah. No sudden moves. They were on this thing's turf, they were gonna play the game for now.
"We just wanna go home. We don't wanna hurt you, if you don't hurt us." But then, she paused.
"Chris didn't forget that girl. Some of us didn't know her. Why'd... why'd you take her?" She swallowed heavily, and perhaps it wasn't so altruistic, but...
"Why'd you take me? Any of us, I guess? Why're we here?"
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Posted: Wed Mar 23, 2016 8:25 pm
Even though she was at a fair distance (or at least she was before the being started moving), she held up her arms in what she hoped was still a universal gesture that she was unarmed. "I don't have any weapons either," she offered, "but we uh, found part of Heliodora out here. Should we bring it back to her?" She really wanted to know what to do with the foot. She'd taken it with her, wrapped up in scraps of fabric and Algie's handkerchief still.
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Posted: Wed Mar 23, 2016 8:28 pm
Behind Autumn, Chris slowly let go of his umbrella and shoulder-bag, placing them down on the ground gently. No weapons, the thing said, and he was going to follow.
"No weapons," He repeated, following the rest of the group. Not that the two items would've been great weapons but there was no use in appearing to be able to cause harm. "We just want to leave and find.. find those who were lost."
A rather intense wave of guilt crashed over Chris but he swallowed, shoved it down. Present, not past.
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Posted: Wed Mar 23, 2016 8:30 pm
at the revelation that there was, in fact, a sock in the shoe, Finn threw his hands up in the air, the umbrella bobbing along with them. "Okay. Maybe." Maybe it was really her foot. The weird vision they'd all just experienced leant credence to that. He wanted to hold out hope against hope that it was just a trick of the Otherworld, a magical illusion and nothing more. Anyway, his boyfriend was puking into the bushes, so Finn excused himself from the front of the group and the weird footprints and the everything else to go check on Aleksy. "You, uh, you okay?" he asked, rubbing him between the shoulders. He looked up. He saw the thing in the woods. "Oh."
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Posted: Wed Mar 23, 2016 8:32 pm
Jeremiah nodded back, just perceptibly towards Autumn. Of all of the people present he was, perhaps, the most obviously armed. Not that he made any motions at the moment to disarm, to change, to anything. It looked as if the creature left but he wasn't sure, like it was part of the forest. Not all of us, he wanted to say, were brought here by ... whatever forces were in play. Not him, not Zac. The others? Yes, but not them. Still, the detective was letting Autumn speak, as well as Chris. His hand did raise to release his gun from his holster, to crouch to the ground and pop out the magazine.
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Posted: Wed Mar 23, 2016 8:35 pm
Alexis did what might, in retrospect, have been the least reasonable thing to do in the situation: they pulled a pocketknife, hands low to their sides but tense, eyes flickering about. It was stupid, it was so stupid -- but -- they were still angry. They didn't make any move to hide the knife. This thing - this whatever-it-was -- it wasn't human. And that wasn't bad. That was good, maybe. But it had still cut off a teenage girl's foot, and that was more than a little ******** up, and Alexis didn't trust it. They made an ugly noise deep in the back of their throat, moving to the side of the crowd to try and get a direct line of sight, and stared.
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Posted: Wed Mar 23, 2016 8:47 pm
Once again, things were happening too quickly for Asiya to really keep track of. First there was a severed foot, then there was a memory that was obviously Heliodora's. Pain followed after that, a sharp and almost crippling pain, that seemed to come from the memory. The group was once again moving after that, and she found herself going along with the crowd.
It was safer in numbers, and like hell she was going to go off on her own after everything that went on. There seemed to be a creature at the end of a footprint trail that they investigated. A creature with six eyes, which didn't look to be too promising. Surely, it could have been friendly, but when had any of the stuff in other Ashdown worked out in their favor?
"..I wonder if it could tell us what is going on. Clearly, we mean no harm to it. I mean no harm to anyone, honestly."Quote: I know a bunch of folks tagged me, but a lot of stuff happened. @ A@ Feel free to quote me for further interactions.
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Posted: Wed Mar 23, 2016 9:01 pm
The thing's eyes bloom into vision again from between two evergreens. They blink, out-of-sequence, gentle and slow. We took no one you children of the other world you find your way we took no one we took no one no weapons no weaponsput them away It looks at Chris. were you glad when Our Heliodora fell silent Did you wish to help? did you or no weapons no weapons discard them You will not touch her
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Posted: Wed Mar 23, 2016 9:05 pm
"Put the knife away," Autumn hissed, not looking back at Alexis. Instead, she took a step closer to the thing, and another, hands still raised and face still passive. Stay calm, she reminded herself. Stay calm.
"Is Heliodora alive?" She asked instead, current line of questioning not getting her anywhere.
"Please. Don't let the knife scare you, baby- just look at me, or the chief back there," she nodded back to Jeremiah. He'd emptied the gun, smart man. "We won't let you get hurt. We just want answers. Please, help us."Ashdown Crier I 100% sign on for Autumn getting ******** up if she's being dumb. You have my consent.
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Posted: Wed Mar 23, 2016 9:10 pm
The clip was emptied, the round in the gun chamber emptied out as well. Jeremiah was setting the gun on the ground, leaving his shoulder holster empty. Some part of him wanted to argue that she hadn't been forgotten but he was still silent. He had not known her before she had gone missing and that was as good as forgotten. It was only in her missing, in her being part of the case, that he even acknowledged her existence. That she was not someone who was within his purview until she became his job. Except that now it was so much more than just his job. "I would advise you put the knife down," he growled towards Alexis. His eyes were hard, dark and staring. This was a man who had no problem meeting a gaze and he would hold it until they broke it. "I will not have you putting people at risk." For the moment he was not looking towards Autumn but when he was mentioned - chief, that made him snort - he gave her a small nod. Jeremiah wanted to watch the thing, watch as it weaved back and forth into the darkness of the trees but he couldn't at the moment. Not when he was looking at them.
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Posted: Wed Mar 23, 2016 9:14 pm
How did people have knives on them?
And guns?
Asiya had never even seen a gun in person before, let alone held one. Yet Jeremiah had it in his line of work, so that was not much of a surprise. The surprise was when Alexis was holding the knife and staring at the creature.
It probably wasn't the best idea that they had.
All Asiya had was questions.
Why did it want Heliodora?
How was it determined who was taken? Why was anyone taken in the first place?
All of this and more ran through her head, but she didn't ask them out loud.
Instead, she just hugged herself again, wishing she could make sense of it all.
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Posted: Wed Mar 23, 2016 9:16 pm
Chris shivered gently at the eyes reappearing, all slightly out of sequence. But they let him know where it was and he followed it's location to keep his eyes on it, wondering where it would go next.
He didn't expect the question though and his eyes widened, wondering how much the thing actually knew.
"I- no. I wanted to help," He replied, and his voice cracked rather embarrassingly. "But it wasn't my place, I didn't want to push her. I didn't want to push her away."
His hands were shaking now, any sense of calm he had gone. "Is she, is she at least okay?"
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Posted: Wed Mar 23, 2016 9:16 pm
"How can we touch her?" Ves wondered aloud, not quite hearing her own voice thanks to the shock of seeing this... creature lurking in the woods. "We don't even know where she is." Her gaze shifted to Alexis with the knife, and she braced herself for something bad to happen. Some sudden burst of anger from the forest beast. "We're not the ones who cut her foot off. Uh. Why did you cut her foot off...?" Not that she particularly needed to know the details.
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Posted: Wed Mar 23, 2016 9:23 pm
Rabbit tapped his toe against the ground, watching three or four concerned citizens try to talk some monster down from bringing out its slicey bits. He was all for attacking it, but unlike a few of the others, he had nothing that might make a dent in the thing besides his fists. It was all too easy to recall how simple it had been for these creatures to take—Heliodora's, was it?—that girl's foot. And the weirdest part was, it'd seemed like she'd agreed to it.
okay, okay, but—don't leave me, okay
It was probably best he didn't mention that. What if this thing and its friends had some sort of... mind control? He lowered his eyes slightly, keeping the thing in his peripheral vision as he waited to see what would come of this whole calm approach.
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Posted: Wed Mar 23, 2016 9:23 pm
"You can't make me," Alexis growls, not at anyone in particular - their whole body is tense as a bowstring, tense as anything.
(They don't move towards the creature-thing, but they don't put the knife away, either.)
"If anyone's at risk here, it's goin' to be me. You can all be safe. I don't want to be." If they die here, who knows if they'll get found? It's a nice idea. An unrealistic, stupid idea, but -- you know. Everyone's got a casual deathwish that they...think about...a lot. Right? Right. "Strange place, you want to be unarmed? Good job with that death wish."
If anything made a move, Alexis thought somewhere distantly, they might have the capability to stab it until it stopped moving. But there were too many people here for that to work.Ashdown Crier its half past midnight what the ******** is staying in one tense thru yr entire response (also everyone feel free to ******** slide tackle alexis' knife or something idk)
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