{ DEFENDERS END } The Jungle And Beyond

[revenant aria]

When Saya woke up, it was with a quiet start. On the ground, still lying down, Saya's hands reached up automatically to wipe her tear-rimmed eyes. Her palms pressed, with a little more pressure intended, onto her eyes a hiccuping sob escapign her. She reached for for her first choice of support, the only support that could be with her, no matter what happened.

But when she called, there was nothing there. No deep voice, no jokes about hos his "older age" couldn't handle this kind of stuff anymore, even though Saya knew he was younger than he let on.

Was it so bad, that Prompto's lack of instant joking, even in bad taste, was the most alarming note about all of this? Well, it wasn't, really, except the connotation it brought. That made her sit up, instead of the immediate concern on her broken nerves, blindly reaching out for her bracelet. It was with a strong relief, that she realized, her bracelet was still there and her weapon hadn't been stolen. Settling back down, Saya let her weary body rest on the ground. She only saw scattered hunters and retreating students for the moment .. and nobody was fully able enough to fight.

"That was too much excitement for a lifetime."  

[Bilious]

"No. No we won't," Jerry murmured.

It was with thoughts of revenge that quieted him, spinning thoughts of experimental runic torches and mass explosions that comforted him. If Roar had been awake, he might have said something, or would have been worried in turn.

Jerry straightened, still leaning on Petra for support, but the main bout of panic had passed, leaving only quiet resignation on what would need to be done.

"I need to find Allan."

x_Nata_x

 

[Lilwolfpard]

(Entering)

If there was one thing Remi learned from this experience, it was that something had to be done. Things could not be left as they were, if they did this would just continue to happen. The hunters would plague them, steal them, use them as...experiments. Who knows if there was a way to actually get back to the island once they left.

The kitsunes ears flicked forward, and backward once more. There was one thing he knew for certain, he was not going to stop now. The horseman got them to the island, they actually were doing things to stop these creatures.

He would follow them.

(exit to lair)  

[Boozver]

Following the Head Priestess. It came so simple and natural as breathing to her. Heidla didn't even have to think about it. Her mind blanked into an easy truce with its own doubts, and she felt herself devoid of any will.

It was natural to follow the elders. It was natural to follow the seniors. If it involved killing, then killing be it. If it involved submitting, then... what was she but not an obedient killing machine? Deep in her heart she wondered when she'd become that easy to handle, but for the moment she was just too tired of illusions. Too tired to guess the reality. Far easier to follow the simple though illusory truth that Medea was offering.

A pang in her heart, and for a moment she came back to her senses and looked around to see where the others were. It was uncomfortable getting back into her own mind, haunted by all the questions. She winced as if pained. Did she really want to go back to Amityville and try to lead an ordinary life? Nah, her reasoning was definitely corrupted. And was her voice even supposed to be heard? Weren't the horsemen simply those being guided - both to fight and to live, to harvest and to hunt? Who is she to try to get the meaning behind the actions of the Head Priestess?

She shut all her reasoning out of her head, and slowly as an automaton followed Medea.

[exiting]  

[Inle-roo]

Each step towards the origin of the sound brought with it fragments of memory. They filled in the lost time like puzzle pieces sliding into place, confusing at first until more of them fit together, revealing a larger picture. By the time the portal came into view, things started to make more sense. Taima remembered the events that led to them being here, a fierce battle, vague whispers of revenge...but that was over now, and it was time to go home. She frowned at the sight of hunters being dragged through the oddly-colored portal, her lip curling slightly in distaste as the head priestess spoke of vengeance, promising power.

Taima wanted none of it. Their job here was done, they had recovered the missing students, and to retaliate against the hunters like this would only invite further trouble. She didn't want to follow them; this was not her fight.

Taima turned when she heard a voice come out of the trees, her eyes easily finding the diminutive form of the elf despite the leaves he tried to cover himself with. She nodded once at his invitation to return to Amityville, her decision made even before he finished speaking. She turned and went through the door in the tree, not even considering looking back at the horsemen and their portal.

((Exiting to Amityville))  

[Toshihiko Two]

Harrison was covered from head-to-toe in grit, a mixture of exhausted and furious. He spat out a clump of sand, wiping his mouth with an equally gritty arm and stumbling from the support of one tree to another.

His legs were wobbling so bad he thought they'd cut out any second.

The only thing keeping him going was anger, which pushed him shakily forward like a freshly-charged battery.

Those sons of bitches.

Hadn't anyone noticed? He felt a pang at the question, although his memory was about as muddy as he looked.

Sometime during the night, the friendship bracelets had finally come unglued, and his and Sasha's sorry excuse for a tent had done ******** all against the encroaching storm. Harrison had been drifting in and out of an uneasy sleep one minute, and the next he'd been soaking wet and up to his chin in a cement-like puddle of sand and mud and jungle.

Shouting for help was about as useful as the tent had been. He couldn't even hear himself over the storm. Struggling made it worse. It was too dark to find solid ground, and by the time the morning rolled around, his situation wasn't much better. His ears were clogged with manufactured pitch. But with slow, regular surety, he clawed his way to shore. Anything he did too fast got him sucked back down, and it was one step forward and three steps back.

Right when he was within reach of salvation, things got weird. He was immobilized- from his muscles locking up or the sand, he didn't know. When he woke up, the events of the previous night were hard to remember. All he knew was that he was angry, and disoriented, and everything was too quiet- and that if he reached far enough he could get a hold of a slippery patch of grasses.

He followed the depression of vegetation and mud back to camp, up a hill and narrowly avoiding a cluster of traumatized-looking snakes. Every step burned. B0nez was too tired to even play background music- Harrison realized this was the reason it sounded quiet, and trying to summon him left Harrison with two sizzling handfuls of nothing. The trail he was following was his. He'd slid a long way.

When he reached the camp, it was wrecked. The fire was long-cold.

He dug a sloppy, completely soaked phone from his pocket. It blinked once, complained about its battery, then died.

Harrison was on his own again.

He searched through the overturned cooler for leftovers, and wiped off his hands the best he could before eating a cold hotdog and setting back off through the jungle. He used the momentum of the last step to take the next one. Eventually he heard the regular, scientific hum of a portal.

What he saw took a minute to process.

Monsters. Horsemen. Ghosts, demons, most of them young, and going through a portal he didn't recognize like a horror parade. Some people were stumbling around, looking dazed. He could pick out about half of their group. There'd been a group of them, in the jungle. They'd held hands...? The Moon patterning on the jackets rung a lot of bells too. Moon Hunters. Like him. There were a ******** of them.

Rep was there, alive, holding onto something- Harrison realized with a chill that it was a stone tablet, and wasn't sure why it sent so many goosebumps up his arms. Like a tombstone. He dredged up the reasoning from murky depths. Weapon tablet. It meant somebody was dead.

The were leaving, it looked like- he didn't want to do anything to spotlight himself in the meantime. He looked down at his leotard and ruined jacket. He probably looked half swamp monster himself. The anger that had driven him so far was leaving him. Something had gone real bad. Maybe he'd been lucky. Maybe he should get out of here while he still could.

"Hey," he tried to catch Rep's attention with a stage whisper. "Psst."  

[Baneful]

There had definitely been more of them than there was now, Rep thought to himself, there were faces missing in the crowd that he distinctly remembered fighting alongside mere minutes before, people who had stood side by side in the wake of Killzone's death. Now there were less - far less, even discarding the rapidly departing students and horsemen.

He froze as a voice nearby seemed to be addressing him and turned, tensed and ready with a glare in case it was some other Halloween creature trying to pretend they were a friend, to pretend they understood. Even as he turned he seized the tablet to his chest tightly, still careful to touch nothing but the jacket around it - it was important.

And for the most fleeting instant, he thought it really was the case, that he was facing a rather strange looking Halloween creature. It was only with slow dawning realisation he thought that there was something oddly familiar about the outline of the figure in front of him, quickly dawning that it was more than just a similar outline.

Panic and relief mingled as he hardly hoped to dare that anything good would come in this day gone horribly horribly ******** wrong.

"Ace?" his voice almost didn't sound like his own, void of the usual confidence and volume it usually possessed.
 

[Toshihiko Two]

"Yeah," Harrison answered, eyeing the stragglers. Ace. He remembered that. "Think I...think I hit my head or something. I can't get B0nez out. Get...get back here, dumbass. What are you doing out in the open with-?"  

[Baneful]

He didn't know. It somehow made it so much worse. Having to put words around it all.

"Something happened. There was. Like. Crystals everywhere and then it was over. I can't summon -"
He corrected himself, of course he couldn't summon Tracey I can't hear Tracey either. But he was there, that was the only consolation he could draw. "The ******** monsters invaded, they ******** up the island and.. like.."

His gaze shifted down to the tablet and it was hard to think all over again. He found himself up against a wall of denial of his own devising. "It...It..." He cleared his throat as if grief was something you could just cough past. "Killzone ******** held the portal. With the bracelet. Like the ones we had." The ground was suddenly interesting and blurry. He's ******** dead. We couldn't hold them off and he's dead and I was useless

But at least Harrison was there, at least there was some stability in the freefall. He looked back to the moon hunter, his tone pleading rather than accusing. "Where were you?"  

[Toshihiko Two]

Harrison glared at him. "In ******** river of quicksand, that's where."

He edged out from behind the tree. He had been using it for support as much as he had for cover.

"Come- come on, we got to...get reorganized, if the whole island's...s**t..." He reached for Rep's arm to pull him back into the undergrowth, but wobbled and almost ended up on the ground. He hung onto Rep instead. "We can't stay out here. Where's..." he searched for a name, "Jerry," he decided.  

[Baneful]

Quicksand. He didn't ask any more than that, in the jungle he'd been hit by all manner of bizarre traps and could only imagine it was something to do with one of them. That or Harrison had just fallen foul of one of the many ******** wonderful things this part of the island had to offer.

As Harrison wobbled, he slipped one arm from around the tablet to support him instead - he didn't give a damn about the sand.

"Aye, we do. But most people seem to be as ******** confused as we are, and no weapons to even fight these ********. Though where do we go? From what I heard HQ got ******** up badly and I wouldn't hold much ******** stock in the rest of the place." The mention of Jerry made him look over his shoulder again. "Eh.. Jerry.. He was here a minute ago, I saw him."  

[Toshihiko Two]

"Wish my...head didn't feel like somebody stuffed it full of ******** cotton." Harrison took the support, then leaned back towards the brush.

Behind the dubious safety of the trees again, he let go of Rep and sat in the wet leaves.

"I'll...find him. We'll get everybody together once the Horseguys are gone-" his voice was still low. He looked over, asking finally, "You hurt anywhere?"  

[Baneful]

"Nothing bandages didn't fix." he offered as optimistically as he could, it was an awful split feeling, feeling relieved to see someone close to him, while tempered with the guilt of the tablet in his possession. It was the endless depth of the guilt the tablet represented that kept him in denial. He didn't want to clear the specifics because it meant dealing.


"I punched a few ******** in the face that tried to attack me, took a bit of a beating but got mended up after. ******** cowards." he explained, neatly avoiding the likewise awful memory of the crystals that could have..should have killed them all. Had it even happened? He couldn't even tell any more which moments after Killzone's death were real or simply mad blind rage at his own helplessness.

He sat down next to Harrison, finally seeming to get the "lets be quiet and not get killed" hint.

"What about you? Wouldn't be able to tell if you were hurt, and those clothes have to be ******** cold." It was his turn to be concerned for a change. "How long were you stuck?"

 

[Toshihiko Two]

"Don't know. I'm tired. Stiff. Think it was a long time." He didn't remember, except for the lingering feeling that... "Nobody came for me."

But if who knew how many people were dead...

"Jordan's...somewhere, isn't he?"  

[Baneful]

"I would have." he said firmly, he was sure of it. Even if the details of events were fuzzy, the feelings were true and instinctual. "I think we got ambushed. I don't think there was a chance." He wanted to argue further, to try and find out why he hadn't found Harrison, why he had been alone, wanted to do something to make things better.

He was completely derailed by the mention of Jordan.

That hollow useless feeling came back tenfold like a punch to the gut. "I think..I think he's not here."

A troubled frown darkened his expression further. "But yeah, I'm tired too." It wasn't physical, he figured ran far deeper than that, bed rest wouldn't give him the kind of peace he needed to feel better again.