Breaking the Seal... (Character, Any!)

by **Senkaku** » Fri Jan 17, 2014 5:20 pm

Krishna was perched in a tree again, but he was not on top of his hill. This tree was far taller, and he was able to lay down on the thick branch where it curved and kinked to connect to the trunk, and even better, it overlooked one of the huge slag heaps he had wanted to look at. He was idly looking through his things, though he had gotten rid of the red button, as it seemed to do absolutely nothing. Now he was trying the bracelet on, tapping the buttons on it.

A voice started yammering at him. It was unintelligible jabbering, as if someone had taken normal speech and then, after speeding it up, garbled it. He could vaguely make out a few words, and images and numbers appeared in holographic form on his eyes, but he couldn't understand them. Glucose levels? Respiration? Oxygen saturation? Internet connection? What did all those words mean? Another hologram- he didn't know how he knew they were called holograms, but his subconscious seemed to be absolutely boiling with activity as memories grew agitated and swam just beneath the surface.

Krishna frowned and turned the machine off. It was only agitating him to watch the bracelet's display flicker behind his eyes. He felt a slight buzzing behind his right ear and reached back.
And felt something that he immediately knew should not be there. It was a plastic coil, clearly firmly attached to his skin, curved around his ear.
Krishna frowned. The day grew stranger yet again. He picked up the bracelet, putting it back in the small case, and pulled out the short blade and the folding gun, then frowned and put them back, walking along the branch so he could get a better view of the slag heap. The pile of rubble and sand was enormous, shaped at its base like a gently curving hill, but then sharpening and rising like the tip of some immense pagan shrine to stab above the canopy. Around it for almost a hundred yards everything had been cleared, and smaller heaps rose in the barren region.
Krishna looked closer, and noticed that there was movement. He looked again, and began to pick them out.
Tens of thousands of tiny, brightly colored creatures no bigger than his pinky were marching across the area, carrying tiny bundles of food or loads of sand and stone. He kept watching, fascinated, as some began marching up the sides of the huge spire, while others headed inside or into some of the hundreds of tunnel openings that dotted the cleared area.
He snapped a branch off the tree and threw it. It flew for perhaps fifty meters, give or take, and hit directly on one of the lines of marching creatures. Several were crushed, while others scattered. A few dozen swarmed the branch, inspecting it, and then, as if commanded by some unseen superior, they began tearing it apart and carrying it inside.
Krishna raised his eyebrows slightly. I shall make sure to avoid those, I think. He looked up and away, towards where the metal building still glinted, and picked up his things.

It would be a long walk.

by **The Elsani City States** » Fri Jan 17, 2014 6:35 pm

Ow
Have to take care of that right arm. It's probably badly bruised, and leaving it to linger isn't going to help this young green woman. Young? She remembers. Ah!, EyNah. That was her name. Ae^Na rendered in her thoughts. She says it out loud, as if to simply confirm that she exists. She would spend a lot of time wandering towards the looming..something..in the distance.

A city! People! That instinctive urge to be among others drives EyNah to seek out that 'city', and defines the look of disappointment when she gets close enough to recognize it is absent life. She is out of her depth, hungry and aching. Whatever she was before all of this, it certainly wasn't something that required survival skills.
Oh dear oh dear.
Panic is kept in check by sheer will to continue, to survive, to find other living, breathing people. And maybe a desire to find shelter before it gets dark. Does it get dark? She has higher priorities. Whatever the ruined state of these buildings, she seems hesitant to approach most. They're high. Very high. And there's tiles, bits and pieces lying everywhere. The closest is some form of construction yard, piles of earth, debris and piping.
Piping? What good will that..oh!
Plastic..something. Perhaps. She doesn't recognize the material, but she does make use of them. Piece after piece is laid out in a row and against the highest pile of debris and earth, looking for all the world like a native wind instrument as done by punks.

Again, she hesitates. She really should be exploring the long, low building nearby that is presumably the central complex of this site. And looking for food. Taking care of that aching arm. First things first, though. Putting lips to her enormous contraption, she throws all hint of subtlety to the wind in making a tremendous noise that would echo for some distance. A slightly wobbly call to arms, she has enough sense to vary it's tone.
Womph! Womph, womph.
Tap. Tap tap. As if morse code she doesn't know how to use, a repeating pattern until EyNah is pale and drops flat on her backside for lack of breath.
Now she can take care of that arm. Tearing off a strip of that grey jumpsuit to wrap about it in a primitive bandage, she hopes it would stem the ache. It's not as if the jumpsuit will be of much use in keeping her warm. Badly torn in that initial tumble, only partially covering, as much a mess as her hair.
The latter she can fix as she waits for..something. She's not sure of what might come in response to her 'music'-or even if it will.
An oddly serene thing, setting her hair in a long braid. Perhaps she was a hairdresser?

by **YellowApple** » Fri Jan 17, 2014 8:14 pm

Ed finally woke up to a dark-violet sky; whether it was morning or evening, Ed couldn't be sure, but whatever the case, he finally felt somewhat well-rested. He pushed himself up from the ground and onto his feet, stumbling for a brief moment, and began to survey his surroundings again.

The air felt dense and thick as he tilted his head again a couple of times, reconfirming a magnetic "north" and "south" by examining the polarization of the ultraviolet light entering his eyes. His head finally turned horizontally as his eyes scanned the beach in front of him. White sands, and what seemed to be a rather large body of water touching those sands, reflecting the sky and its myriad of stars. Ed stumbled toward this water, the black boots on his feet sinking into the sand as he drew closer to the ebb and flow of rising and falling fluid, before he finally fell to his knees near the water and cautiously touched it. Noticing that his fingertips were not melting away or otherwise harmed by the liquid, he washed his hands in it, then cupped them and brought a bit of the water to his lips to taste.

Ed sipped a bit of the water in his hands, paused a moment to contemplate the taste, then swallowed. The word "saline" came to mind, though he didn't know what that word meant, nor did he remember where he could have possibly learned it. He did, however, have a hunch that the weird-tasting water would feel good on his wings, and thus he crawled into the water a bit and dunked his wounded left wing into the water for a moment before bringing it back up, then followed with a brief dip of his uninjured right wing. After another moment of contemplation, Ed concluded that his hunch was correct, and he dipped his broken wing into the water again, enjoying the cool temperature as it seemed to begin to numb the pain on that wing.

After a few dozen seconds of wing-soaking, Ed stood up again, bringing his dripping-wet wings into position on his back, before turning back toward the crater from which he had previously emerged. As he slid back into the narrow depression, he sighted the strange, elongated, and hollow object again, and - out of curiosity - approached it. Grasping the handles on its side with his hands, Ed pulled the object further out of the rocks previously covering it, inspecting the object closely. Various unusual and incomprehensible markings throughout the interior and exterior alike caught his eye; some kind of strange, previously-unencountered language? He did, however, notice a blinking green light in the interior, labeled with more of the unintelligible script, and what appeared to be a removable panel of sorts on the exterior near where the light seemed to be coming from.

Ed fumbled about on his uniform jacket for a moment, expecting to find something useful. He quickly felt something hard, and longer than it was wide; he unzipped the pocket the object was stowed in and reached his hand into it, withdrawing some kind of odd-looking object with a rubberized handle and a complicated-looking mechanism attached to that handle. A part of the handle appeared to be detached from the rest; Ed instinctively twisted the handle and the piece thereof in opposite directions, then nearly dropped the item in fear as the mechanism suddenly transformed and morphed into a cross-shaped point at the end of the device. He twisted in the opposite direction, and the device's point became three-finned, then simply a flat blade, before finally forming a point. With some twisting in the opposite direction, he managed to cause the device to achieve a five-finned point to match some seemingly-complementary notches in the panel he had noticed previously; he then inserted the device into one such notch and, rather unconsciously and far-from-deliberately, rotated the device, causing the point - and the notch - to rotate with it. He kept spinning the device, watching the notch turn into some kind of helical object, until said object fell out of the panel and onto the ground. He did the same with four other such notches until the panel itself fell onto the ground and revealed a complicated-looking series of wires and components.

After another moment of fumbling about in his jacket, Ed found another item: a dual-handled object that seemed to open and close as the handles were pulled apart and pushed together again. The object had sharp-looking edges on the inside, with various circular notches throughout the length of the non-handled portion aside from a straight - but still quite sharp-looking - shear of sorts. Ed examined the device, then the wires, then the device again, before concluding its purpose; he identified two wires - red and black - attached to a large cylindrical object of sorts and severed both wires, starting with the red; the light thus stopped blinking. With power seemingly cut, his dissection of the strange "pod" began.

by **Scolopendra** » Fri Jan 17, 2014 8:47 pm

This wasn't right. It just wasn't. "Tell me why it isn't right, brain."

Bounce.

"Ungh. That's your answer to everything."

She'd been walking for some time now. Her feet didn't hurt--well, other than the scabbed over gash--so much as they were sore. Not blister-sore either; just apparently-doesn't-walk much sore. That seemed odd too. She was obviously rather fit, as far as she knew. Walking is supposed to be one of those things that fit people do. Now she stood at a crossroads, not really planning on turning, but also finding herself increasingly uneasy about her situation.

She was in a city, that was obvious.

The city was dead, as was also obvious.

The city wasn't the right kind of dead, though, as far as she'd seen. Things were missing, and her kirottu brain wasn't helping... wait, those were two different languages. She was bilingual, maybe. The 'damned' part was Finnish. That could be convenient later, again maybe.

Still, there was something wrong here and she guessed, from how she'd been recognizing things up until now, that it was something missing. If it was something visible, she'd have recognized it and known it was the problem. Ergo, it was a problem of something not spurring something in her brain, obviously.

Sighing, she swallowed dust and figured it was time to start searching for water again. There'd be other cisterns all throughout the city, like the one that fed The Apartment underneath The Facility. It was a reasonable assumption to make, at least. Looking closely at the shorter buildings around her to lock her bearings, she picked one on her left and headed over to it. Large, round porthole-like windows filled the adobe-colored concrete wall at street level, and as she neared she found it smelled like dust and decay. The windows were clear, however, so she peered in to see wavy shelves full of canisters and boxes and other things. The next window revealed piles of browning mush that may have been more colorful and less mushy in the past.

Fruit? In piles? Store. She followed the building around its rondure and found another oval door made of something clear akin to glass. Pushing, pulling and sliding failed.

She hadn't quite finished thinking 'locked' by the time she'd pulled the table leg from her belt and sent it straight through the door with a mighty swing. The door was indeed made of glass; its shattering destroyed the silence for a sharp instant and set it scattering before it down the streets before nothingness recouped and reasserted itself. She had to resist the urge to break more windows, just to hear something that wasn't wind and breathing, to fill the not-right absence. The sickly-sweet smell of rotten fruit that made her recoil just made that resistance all the easier.

She grit her teeth and looked inside. The smell got stronger, but she could manage it; the shelves remained untouched. Nothing she expected happened, and what she expected she didn't know. Carefully stepping over the jagged remains of the pane still in the doorframe she crunched into the store. The first thing that caught her eye were metal canisters with curved plastic lids. The canisters were cylindrical, and they could contain food or liquid.

Taking one, she popped off the lid to reveal a plastic lever next to a small metal aperture. She thought 'nozzle,' knelt down, and pointed it at the floor at arm's length before triggering the lever with her thumb. The can hissed, the tile floor's texture changed from matte to glistening, and a flowery smell mixed with the rotten-fruit smell she was quickly learning to ignore. She dabbed the glistening with her pinkie. It was slick. She very carefully tasted the tip of her pinkie, preparing to regret it for some reason. Instead, it was just slightly fruity but mostly tasteless. Some kind of plant oil.

She replaced the cap and put it in her bindle. The next thing that caught her eye was a glass hexagon about a meter across, with glittery fine wires inside, a larger version of what she'd scrounged earlier in The Apartment. Whatever it was, then, it was scalable. Out of curiosity, she poked it, then ran her fingers around the edges. She must have done something, because it suddenly lit up an opaque green color.

She blinked. It was a bit lighter than she was, when she compared her skin tone to its. There was a yellow symbol displayed in one corner. She poked at it; the symbol changed but the color did not. She poked at it again; it changed, but the color did not. She poked it a little lower and it changed back.

"Useless. You are useless." She stroked it again where she stroked it last before it turned on, and thus turned it off. It just felt right to do so.

The next thing she saw was a chain. Sturdy links of metal, about three meters' worth. She thought that could come in more handy than the wire in some circumstances, so she bindled it. She could always drop it later if she had to.

Now, though, she needed water. She started going through cans and containers plastic, metal, and glass, with a preference for clear liquids she could see. After about three different forms of vinegar and household solvents, going by careful smells, she found something that was odorless. Of course, that didn't mean anything. That meant it was time for the pour-and-pinkie test.

Thus she found water, guzzled the jug she found, then took all the jugs she could find--all seventeen. That was a lot.

Suddenly, the calculus changed. This was a lot of water, and it stood to reason there was a secure supply of food here too. Where was she going anyway? What was the point? She didn't even know if she could survive in the wild; she was only leaving because there was no one here--

No one here? Was that it? Did she need other people? Why?

Because... bounce. She inferred that yes, there was a reason, but of course she couldn't remember it. Still, it's not like picking a direction and heading down it would help. No, if she needed people, she needed to know where there were people. It'd be easier to do that if she stayed here and, from the tops of buildings, charted the area. She could survive here for a time, and move on when her water supply dwindled to that which she could easily carry.

With that in mind, finding cisterns was more important than relying on bottles.

And accelerating the finding of others would reduce her reliance on dumb luck in finding supplies.

How to do that, though? And gods, the smell--

Two birds with one stone.

*-*-*

A few hours later she'd finished piling the rotten everything she could find from the store in the middle of the crossroads. It wouldn't have taken so long but she had to find pouches and bags she could use as gloves to handle the fruit. Try as she might, she couldn't bring herself to touch the muck, and even then she gagged more than once. Then she sprayed the pile down with several cans of the fruit oil, and, just in case, dumped a whole bottle of alcohol over the mess.

Now she just needed a way to light it.

"Slight flaw in my plan."

She could rub sticks together, right? Friction. She didn't have any sticks, though. Maybe the canvas-like fabric sticks in her pocket could work.

They didn't.

She tried creating sparks with the chain against the tiles next to her pile of fuel. That didn't work either.

Fire. Energy. Power. She walked back to the hexagonal color-machine she found earlier, investigated it more closely. A wire lead from it over to the wall--an electricity socket. Electricity.

Something clicked in her head. She pulled the cord from the wall, looked at the outlet. Three holes. Positive, negative, grounding. She yanked the cord from the color-machine, looked at the frayed ends and ignored the machine falling off the shelf and cracking against the floor. Two leads. Well, this was easy.

She also got the feeling that something else wasn't quite right, but she ignored it. She scoured the store, finding more wires and eventually things she recognized as extension cords. She chained the latter as far as they could go and then, between her ceramic shard and her fingertips, spliced the wires together along with her not-quite rope out to her pyre in the middle of the street. Running back to the store, she plugged her makeshift contraption in. A whump and small flash of light later, and the pile of rotten trash outside had caught light. She cheered to herself, unplugged the cord, and pulled it back, running out to stomp extinguished the smoldering end.

It smelled like a rotting fruit distillery burning, but she smiled as thick black smoke curled into the air. Someone was bound to see that.

The Elsani City States wrote:Womph! Womph, womph.

She looked around sharply at the echoing noise. Music? A signal? Clock tower or church bell? No clue, but she couldn't tell what direction it was coming from. All the more reason for her to get to a higher vantage point.

by **Midlonia** » Sat Jan 18, 2014 3:48 am

Black Smoke, something’s on fire!

There was an impulse for him to head towards the fire, not away from it, the flash of danger that appeared at the back of his mind was one of putting himself at risk to make sure everyone else was safe. Was he… a fireman?

Fireman, that seems familiar, along with maintenance… extraction…

What the heck did he do for a living?

He picked his direction, towards the black smoke, something had set it going, or someone and he wanted to know what.

Hefting his hammer onto his shoulder again he began walking down the middle of the roadway, stepping around the various bits of rusting metal that had once been transportation.

Shops. He thought to himself as he saw the large glass frontages. He looked into one of the windows and peered. The inside was dead, dark and filled with the rotting remains of clothing. He shook his head and checked his own clothes before shrugging and moving onwards.

He turned down another street, headed towards the spire of black smoke which by now was thickening and climbing ever higher into the sky. He pursed his lips and paused when he came upon a large building with a small booth at the front. Flashes of memory again before he peered at the strange, jumbled writing at the top of a poster, still fairly well preserved inside its frame.

Mag-us H-sche and The… The rest of the poster had been caught by rainwater or something as it had rotted away. A large chiselled jawed man stared out confidently. He pursed his lips before shaking his head and walking on again.

The next store that caught his eye was a pawn shop. He knew what it was from the way there was a random collection of things inside the window when he peered inside. Displayed right at the front was a sword of some form, along with a veritable treasure trove of jewelry, slabs which his brain told him were computers and how he communicated with people…

Why’s that?

His eyes narrowed for a moment before he shook his head again, shaking off the thought as he struggled to comprehend it. Instead he felt his helmet rattle slightly and he took it off to quickly inspect it. A small lever had worked its way loose from the rest of the lamp and he instinctively began turning it, the light flickered briefly into life and he smiled. Flicking the switch and putting it back on his head he felt a little more reassured now he had some form of light should darkness come soon again.

Another turned corner and the smell of rotting, burning fruit mixing into a kind of fermentation which was being slowly burnt off hit him. He coughed a little as a slight gust of wind blew the black smoke down at him for a moment before it carried it up and out into the cityscape.

He dropped the pole of his hammer down with a clank and looked around. The fire had been set up just right so it wouldn’t cause issues for anyone else. Another moment of comprehension that seemed to clue in to something else he knew but couldn’t quite put his finger on. Nearby, a glass door to the store had been broken into and he sniffed again at the smell of the garbage-fire.

by **New Koln** » Sat Jan 18, 2014 6:17 am

Nank and Maria wake up and Nank says
"Hello"
Maria says
"Hello what's your name?"
Nank responds while scratching his head.
"I don't know my name do you know yours?"
Maria scratches her head too and responds worried.
"I don't know, I don't know my name."
Nank and Maria now walk in the future streets and Nank says worried
"Were are we?"
A stranger gets in their way and he's looking them angry and asks loudly.
"Who are you, are you from the past?"
Nank responds
"Yeah I think but we don't know ourselves.Who are you?"
The stranger responds fastly
"My name is Ludwick Von Hicken and your in the Dutch empire in Northern Europe."
Nank and Maria look each other and they ask.
"What year is now?"
Ludwick answers peacefully slapping his face.
"The year now is 2361 here."
Nank remembered that he was in Netherlands the last time and it was cold there and then he said.
"I remember I was in Netherlands and it was cold there"
Ludwick responds fastly.
You're lucky cause you're in in the metropolitan Eidhoven area.It's cold there record-breaking cold was in 2014 with -81 degrees celsius and they had 20 deaths.Maybe they thought you're dead.
Maria remembered something and responded fast
"I remembered my name.My name is Maria and your's is Nank, I also remembered people shouting our names"
Nank responded fastly remembering old times.
"I just remembered something.I remembered we were skiing cause we were proffesional skiers."
Nank,Maria and Ludwick are going to Ludwick's house.
Suddenly a strange man is following them and throws with laser. Nank ducks down and and asks loudly.
"Ludwick who's he?"
Ludwick answers while running
"He is Son Von Hicks he is the worst criminal of Dutch empire"
Maria asks while running
"What did he do?"
Ludwick answeres while running
"He killed 200 people in just a bank robbery"
Nank says
"Too manypeople died in that robbery man"
Ludwick says
"Hell yeah but now RUN!"
Nank and Maria answer
"OK"
When they finally hide Nank says
"Someone has to say something"
Maria asks
"Who?"
Nank responds
"You, off course Ludwick"
Ludwick says
"Dutch empire is enemy of Norselands, the Scandinavia of your age"
Nank says
"Ok"

by **Roania** » Sat Jan 18, 2014 8:43 am

The tunnels eventually began to slope upwards, bringing with it the scent of light, of smoke, of the sun and clean air... and then he was stopped. Stopped by the chains that held his wrist. He pulled, and pulled, and felt them give, just a little, but they trailed endlessly backwards, into the blackness he had just left. No, not when he was so close... had he been imprisoned all along? A voiceless terror gripped him, and he pulled on the chains again. Freedom, the light... he had not known he had wanted these things, but now, he would kill to have them. A growl left his lips, low and animal, and he pulled again and again, each time feeling the chains pull back.

No. No. NO. The word left his lips in a cry, loud and sharp, shattering the silence, echoing through the tunnel. Another cry, and another, each louder than before, until he almost deafened himself with his screams. And then, suddenly, a sound left his throat. Loud, high, low, quiet... all of these things at once. And the chains that held him shattered.

by **Sunset** » Sat Jan 18, 2014 8:51 am

Dragging the make-shift raft out into the surf had been the hardest part of her plan.

At least, that's what she'd thought until she'd tried to get on the raft. It had then flipped like a turtle and sent her straight to the sandy bottom. A few strong kicks and she was back at the surface but she'd realized right there that trying to ride the raft with her small crate was likely to scatter what little she had over the sea floor.

"So I won't ride it," she said as she watched it bob in the small waves at the edge of the sand. "I'll push it to the next island, walk, and then do the same thing."

It did make more sense, if she was a strong swimmer, but she hadn't known that until she'd fallen off the raft. Pulling the raft higher up, she placed the bin in the center and then considered it again. The table was reasonable long and wide, but now she was worried about it. A few of the long fronds harvested from the shrubs near the shore solved the problem and as she wove them through the bin and between one of the boards on the table, she looked out over the water and hummed a little tune.

"Which," she realized, "I don't recognize. Am I making that up?"

She hummed it again, then she tried whistling it. It sounded familiar both ways but in that tip-of-the-tongue way that many of the things she'd seen or done since she'd woken up the first day had been. It made her happy though so she kept doing it.

Pushing her raft back out into the surf, she turned to look back at the island. So many questions; Was this where she was supposed to be? Were there other people out there? What about the thing? A fence? Fences kept things in. Was it supposed to keep her in? She turned around and saw at least one answer. Far in the distance, floating over the white round things, black smoke was rising.

A fire?

To her, a fire meant cooking and warmth and a weird disconnected sense of family.

The raft floated free and she followed it into the surf.

by **Senkaku** » Sat Jan 18, 2014 10:33 am

Night had settled and it had been dark for at least two hours when Krishna hit the edge of the ruins. There had clearly been a city here once- there were crumbled buildings, overgrown boulevards, houses sagging in and slouching against one another as the jungle reclaimed them. The glint he'd seen was just the barren steel skeletons of one of the taller buildings stabbing high above the treeline. As he got closer to it, the stench of rotting fruit and death began to grow stronger.

Krishna, for whatever reason, felt at ease in the dead city. He had climbed five stories up a ruined tower and slept perched on a steel beam, tying himself to it with vines taken from the jungle with his short knife.

Day had broken over the dead city.
Another memory breached from the mind of his subconscious, though he was unaware of it this time, and he unconsciously began calling it the drowned city. He clambered back down and began walking again.
Smoke peaked over the mountaintops in a greasy, snakelike rope, and Krishna frowned at it. An accidental fire, sparked by some long-abandoned capacitor or electrical system could be disastrous with no one to put it out. He paused, staring as the smoke plume rose higher and higher above the mountaintop.
He now had two paths. He could head through the pass between two mountains that this portion of the city seemed to stretch into, or he could climb the largely-undeveloped mountain to get an idea of where he was and where the smoke was coming from. He chose the mountain and started walking.
With his augmented muscles, it took less than an hour for him to climb the mountain, which was around a thousand feet taller than the surrounding foothills that rose in gentle slopes from the coastal plain where Krishna's pod had crashed. Sweating and breathing hard from the climb, he finally reached the summit. It was a sharp ridge with no trees that stretched along the backbone of this peak, plunging down and then rising back up to create other mountains that stretched away in a low, continuous succession as far as he could see to either side.
The drowned city sliced a path straight through the mountains, creating a clearly artificial pass that it snaked through to billow outwards across the heavily forested plains. Krishna could see lakes, the grid pattern of the drowned city, huge crumbling roads marching straight as rulers to the horizon. The towers of this side were much taller, shattered, hollow spires that still retained an air of majesty, as birds fluttered in and out. There were other towers, more spindly contraptions, that though shorter than the ones at the city center, carried long, thick cables, and these moved parallel to the roads, stretching on for miles and miles, connecting to a large building full of spindly machines and massive capacitors. Krishna picked out no slag heaps amidst the rubble- thankfully. But perhaps two or three miles away, he could see the smoke's source. It stretched in a long, diagonal line, sweeping the ridgeline, and he choked and coughed as some of it hit him. It smelled like rotten fruit burning, and he hurriedly moved off the very top of the mountain, swearing under his breath.

I think I'll stay up here. If I get caught in a fire, that would be very bad. And if someone else is doing that... well, they can't be very nice if they're trying to burn a city down.

by **Scolopendra** » Sat Jan 18, 2014 11:47 am

She’d just managed to make it to the rooftop above the fourth floor when she saw him. For a moment she thought that her little signal fire had brought rapid results, but then she remembered the slow going to first find a stairwell and then cautiously go up it, then what she had to do to break the lock on the roof access. Leaning out over the safety wall, she yelled down to her potential rescuer. “Hey, down there!”

The big figure continued staring at the fire, then slowly looked back down the way he had come, and then cautiously further down the street. He set the large hammer down for a moment and then scratched at his chin, wondering who had set it and why. It was clear from the way it had been made of trash they weren’t burning anything of value, or he hoped so, the pillar of black smoke twirling high into the sky. It was definitely a signal fire. He also knew there was nothing nearby that would be of use should it actually get out of control.

She yelled again, louder this time. When that didn’t work, she picked up a few bits of gravel from the rooftop and threw them near him to get his attention.

The gravel scattered onto the ground near his boots and his eyes quickly darted across to them with another, slow frown. He began looking around him again before he looked slowly up towards the rooftops. His helmet at least shielded his face from the sun and he peered up towards the figure he could see the silhouette of. He tentatively waved to the figure.

She smiled and waved back, then shouted again, cupping her hands around her mouth for emphasis as well as to amplify herself. “Yeah, you!”

The figure stayed where he was, then tentatively waved again, waving her down instead. Why hadn’t she tried speaking to him? Was it a language barrier?

She figured the wave would do for a response and so held one finger up in the ‘one moment’ gesture. Then she ran back to the roof access, shoe-socks crunching against the gravel, and down the stairs far less cautiously than she went up them. Less than a minute later she was hopping through the broken front door to the street. Closer now, details were obvious: about two meters tall, green-skinned, blond-haired, and built rather sturdily. She wore her chain and wire around each shoulder, lashed together into a simple harness; her bindle made a purse, and she had a jug and a strip of metal tucked into her obviously field-expedient belt of torn fabric. “About time someone got here. I’m… long story.” She paused for a moment and squinted. “Are you okay?”

The man was about the same height, if slightly taller, and he was built much broader than the woman, large muscles formed tight knots around his arms and legs. He frowned as the woman’s lips moved, but he couldn’t hear any sound. The language seemed familiar though and he followed the movements until ‘okay?’

He paused and then licked his lips in a moment of thought and habit, revealing slightly elongated fangs behind his lips.

I’m deaf. He suddenly realised as the comprehension kicked in. No wonder I couldn’t hear anything.

He tapped his ears and then shook his head, and repeated the action a second time before shrugging slightly.

She frowned. Somehow, it figured. Hopefully he was literate. She motioned him over to one of the windowpanes.

He looked to her, then nodded, following her, picking the hammer up in one hand again and leaning it against the solid wall of the shop.

Her somewhat broad features smiling as he followed, she turned to the glass and drew on it with one finger. It wasn’t quite dusty enough to hold words, but hopefully he could follow her finger, which she hoped she moved slowly enough to form WILL THIS DO? in big, block letters.

He followed her letters, then looked to her, he breathed on the glass heavily revealing the lettering some more thanks to the moisture. He nodded to her, then breathed on the glass again, in the middle of the patch which formed he simply drew the letter Y.

Progress! She wiped away what had been accomplished with one forearm and drew again, adding her own breath at the end. AM LOST. DON’T KNOW WHO I AM. NEED RESCUE.

He nodded and then breathed on his own part of the pane.

SAME. Was all he wrote. Then looked to her and shrugged before adding. POD TOO?

She looked down and shook her head but, in spite of herself, grinned. Wipe and repeat. FIGURES. Y. IN BUILDING. She pointed downtown, towards the somewhat visible tower with the hole in it.

He looked up towards the tower, then nodded. He gestured back towards the outer edge of the city. TOWER 4 ME went onto the window.

She nodded thoughtfully, tapping her chin before folding her arms. So she wasn’t the only amnesiac. No point asking him who he was or how he got here or what was going on. Her response was, therefore, NEED WATER?

He nodded at that and smiled, removing his red helmet he wiped his brow a little and tapped his throat. He shrugged his backpack off his shoulders and held it in one hand before offering for her to head through the doorway.

She smiled and nodded at the courtesy, hopping through the door once again and gesturing towards the jugs she’d collected. Somehow, she didn’t mind too much that her survival water usage had just doubled. Though she had to tell him the plan… but no window. Snapping her fingers, she pulled the little glass hexagon out of her bindle and breathed on it before drawing on it with a pinkie and handing it to him. This should do for now. Keep it.

He smiled and nodded. Thanks.

He set the backpack down and opened it, retrieving the bottle and setting the wrench to the side. He breathed on the hexagon again and pointed to the wrench.

Weapon. For you.

That was the sweetest thing anyone had ever done for her within her recollection. That it was also the only thing anyone had ever done for her within her recollection was irrelevant at this point; it was a good start. She bowed politely with a broad gesture and accepted it, tucking it into her belt before requesting the hexagon-slate with a point and an open-hand gesture.

He handed it to her with a nod then looked around the store a little, not moving just yet but looking curiously. Something seemed to hit him when he glanced to the box tipped over on the floor but he shrugged it off.

She breathed on it and wrote as small as her pinkie would allow. She had to wipe and start again a few times before handing it back, tapping him to get his attention. Thx 4 wpn. Ths is hme bas. Cistrns in bldgs arnd; fnd + use. Mk slf @ home.

He nodded and took the piece of glass, he decided to place it carefully into his backpack, opening the top a little more to be able to push it inside, when it definitely didn’t fit he shrugged and set it to the side, carefully on top of a shelf. Sniffing a little at the still persistent smell of rotting fruit he stood up more fully and picked one of the containers of water up, uncorking it and sniffing it briefly before taking a few swigs. He seemed happier at that moment and then carefully set it down, counting out the water bottles and nodding when he replaced the cork.

He moved down a couple of the isles, settling on the one where the hexagon of glass had come from. He moved passed several such displays, looking if anything for a slightly smaller pane of glass to be able to take with him if and when they left here for other supplies. There was a smaller one about 30 centimetres across, half the size of the other one and he picked it up.

The long trailing power cable set his mind whirling again and without even thinking he pressed a part of the hexagon which brought it to life. His finger trailed across the screen where the small hexagonal symbol followed and he quickly traced one large finger around the shape. It seemed to open the device up and he smiled a little at the strange familarity of it. He’d owned one of these once, he was sure of it.

When?

He began to play with it a little bit, soon finding something that approached a word processor of some sort. His smile got wider as he managed to remember where the options were for the settings.

The colors and lights caught her attention and she came around to see what was going on, maintaining a respectful distance since sneaking up on the deaf was something she knew she was not supposed to do. Seeing him--she’d have to think of a name for him--make it do things made her fold her arms and nod appreciatively. This was a good thing. Then she wondered why she wasn’t filled with wonder at this. No, it made sense, considering the other hexagon and its color-generation.

‘Computer,’ she thought. That clicked. She didn’t recognize it, but that is what it was. Probably.

He tapped something out on the screen then nodded before pressing another button.

“Hello.” The computer said with a flat, electronic voice. “Can you hear me?”

“Yes,” she replied aloud, “but that’s not the problem.”

He looked down at the glass plate and smiled, he then held it up, showing her words on the screen beneath his. He grinned again before typing.

“Power must be coming from something, somewhere.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “It’s how I started the fire. No power in The Facility where I woke up, though.”

He frowned a little, glancing down then looking up again. He seemed to be following the cables and where they led. Even though they simply vanished into the shelves the key thing was they all seemed to head upwards.

“Rooftop?”

“I got up there just in time to see you. It’s possible.”

“Needs a battery to keep this running. I think.” He pursed his lips, then set the hexagon down and looked upwards. If he could get some sort of power set up, they could eventually take it with them. “It’s… moveable. But limited.”

He scratched his chin again and shrugged to her.

“Maybe the little hexagon works the same way?” she offered.

He looked to her, then tilted his head and nodded. With a quick tug he pulled the cable from the bottom of it. The screen continued to light up and he breathed out, a large puff of breath that sent some wisps of dust drifting across the shelves.

“I think the batteries on these lasted a while.” He typed before tucking it under one arm.

“We should conserve power,” she said aloud, while she thought something more along the lines of ‘so you recognize some of this.’ Now wasn’t the time, though. It was just good to have someone to talk to, after a fashion, even if she was no closer to being rescued.

by **Karcharis** » Sat Jan 18, 2014 3:17 pm

Consciousness returned in stages.

The eyes opened, and registered both light and a sensation the body identified as pain. The eyes closed again, scrunched tight against the blinding sky overhead. The body made a mewling sound and one arm came up to shield the eyes. There were several long, shuddering breaths. The eyes opened again, and registered a black thing blocking most of the view. When it moved, the light flowed back into the space where it had been. That was the arm, then. Best to leave it there for now. The body was constricted, encased in some kind of outer layer. Its range of motion was further restricted by banging into something.

There was a part of the body which registered all these sensations. Call that a mind, then. Right now the mind was expressing deep distress at this situation, alarmed at the novelty and uncertainty of it all. Nothing like this had ever happened in the history of the universe to date (two minutes or so). That history was truncated; there was a sense of absence, the phantom sensation of an appendage no longer present. But if there were things - the light, the constriction - exterior to the body, history might exist externally also, and predate what had hitherto been the beginning of all things.

There was a part of the mind which registered all these thoughts; metacognition achieved. Call that a self. The self was part of the mind which was part of the body, and the body was in an outer layer which was in turn in some sort of cylindrical thing, and the light was sloshing into that from some kind of less opaque area. Self, mind, body, outer layer, cylindrical thing, light. The universe now had appropriate layers to it.

To interrogate the status of the self would require some sort of elaborate metametacognition, but the self definitely had the impression that there was something wrong with the mind. All this should be happening more readily, things should have easily applicable labels. Names, that's it, things should have names. There was a sense that names were central to the thing-ness of things. The self christened itself I, and expanded to take stock of its subordinate entities. Passing over the aforementioned problems with the mind, the body seemed to have no obvious discontinuities of function - feet, legs, tail, torso, arms, hands, head, horns, ears, all accounted for. Proprioception reporting full physical integrity. Good. The outer covering was some sort of smooth stuff - call it fabric, that's a good name - with an obvious seam down the center, dividing it bilaterally. Clothes, that's right. Clothes protected against external factors, like the light. Clothes sorted into subcategories; shoes, suit, belt. A complicated shape around her neck resolved itself into a pair of large goggles and something fabric, more tactile. A scarf, that's it.

External to the clothing was the cylindrical thing, a different category as it was around the body but not attached to it. The cylindrical thing sorted into lower half, softer, padded with some other kind of fabric and contoured to fit the body, and upper half, transparent, through which the light flooded in. A further subdivision; these two halves were demarcated by a strip of something hard, shiny, grayish. Metal. A metal cylinder with a kind of mattress and a window in it. There, external objects were acquiring names. This was right and proper.

A hollow in the metal resolved itself into an inset lever, bordered by red and white stripes. Levers turned, or possibly pulled; the hands investigated this one and found that it pulled, then turned. The cylinder became a pair of hemicylinders, one metal and one glass, and the boundary between cylinder and things-outside-the-cylinder was bridged by air, thick with moisture and salt and organic compounds. Collapse the distinction between cylinder and outside-the-cylinder, then, now that the cylinder had taken it upon itself to breach that mental category. Self, mind, body, clothes, and then the whole of the universe unattached to the self. The whole of the universe unattached to the self contained: one cylinder, now divided longitudinally into two halves; air, which the body noted was good for breathing; a sky, lavender; light flooding out of a white circle in the sky, painfully bright (call that a sun); water, bright blue, in air-driven ripples, stretching out into the lavender haze; sand, nearly as glaringly white as the sun.

The goggles were digging into the neck. Goggles went on the head, and the spilling light of the sun dimmed to an acceptable hue. The world snapped into blue and white and ripples. Automatically a hand lifted to the side of the goggles, where there was a round nubbly thing. Focusing dial. Another round nubbly thing. Zoom dial. Turning it brought the world back to its normal scale. A device for altering the external universe, how useful. There was a switch next to the dials; moving it made the world dissolve into static. Again, and the world reappeared, overlaid with a crazed hash of green lines. Again, and the world returned to normal. The switch didn't do anything useful, then. Odd; it seemed like it should.

Focus again on the universe-attached-to-the-self. The suit covered the body except for hands, head, tail and feet (which were covered by the shoes instead). It was black and slightly glossy except for a round white circle on the left breast, near the shoulder. Roundel, insignia, icon; what could be a stylized plant or animal, or just a black-and-white squiggle. Below it, white squiggles which resolved themselves into words, upside down: Syrinx, called The Cunning. Executor-Aspirant. Syrinx was a girl's name, and yes, there were breasts; therefore it was probable that the self was female, and named Syrinx. I am Syrinx. That seemed right. But what is an Executor-Aspirant? No answers seemed forthcoming to that one.

Syrinx the Cunning, Executor-Aspirant, stood up. Fell down. Whoops. Bipedal locomotion contraindicated due to … something. Dizziness. Damn. I don't feel very cunning right now. She found the edge of the glass half of the cylinder, hauled herself up on that, clung to it while the world spun and wavered around her. At length, she cunningly stopped the whirling rotation of the universe upon an axis around her head, and was able to see herself, somewhat distorted, as a shadowy reflection in the glass of the cylinder. Tall, thin, black suit, skin as white as the sand (close-up examination of her hands revealed a tracery of dark veins beneath the skin). Narrow face, eyes hidden behind the shiny black goggles (themselves reflecting her reflection in the glass, recursively). Black horns at her temples, about a hand's length long (embarrassingly short, though she wasn't quite sure why she felt so). A great dark mass of black hair, falling past the small of her back (she felt obscurely glad that that was still there, though again she wasn't quite sure why). Belt slung around her hips, with the same roundel on the buckle, and several attachment points on it disturbingly void of attachments.

Now she could see properly, and the names of things seemed to be applying themselves automatically. Sun. Sky. Sea. Sand (beach). Cylinder thing (unknown). Plants (unknown, unfamiliar) growing larger further from the water's edge, rising to a tiny copse of trees before the land fell away to the beach again. The land was apparently bordered by sea on all sides; that was an island, then, and not a large one. There were brightly colored round things hanging from some of the plants. Fruit. Were they brightly colored to attract birds, or to warn of poison? She didn't know. The thing to do, she thought, was to wait for rescue and not wander off, so that rescuers could find you easily. She sat in the shade of one of the trees and waited for them to arrive. Eventually, while waiting, she fell asleep.

When she woke she discovered that the sun had moved downwards in the sky, and that flat lavender had darkened to something almost maroon. Still no sign of rescuers; perhaps they had gotten lost, and were themselves in need of rescue. She didn't think she knew how to rescue them, but it was probably best to start by looking around the island. There were trees, bushes, smaller plants, but no people, and no animals larger than little endoskeletal things, many-legged. Insects. There was the cylinder thing in which she'd entered existence, that was artificial and therefore sign of conscious intent. There were small bits of polished, sea-worn glass here and there in the white sand, that was artificial too. She found a few round hollow orange things - something related to fishing, she thought, also artificial. So there were probably other conscious minds somewhere.

Beyond her little island was another, larger, and a few more in the distance; but she couldn't think of a way to cross from here to there, even though she thought there ought to be one.

Perhaps the rescuers had not seen her; she lacked a … a thing, which made a bright light, which you used in such situations. Out of some vague idea, she arranged bits of driftwood on the beach into lines, making a right angled triangle. Right angles were not naturally occurring, so anyone seeing it would know to look for her here. She hoped they came along soon; she was starting to get hungry, and thirsty, and she didn't want to risk eating the fruit, which might be poisonous. There was a way to extract fish from the ocean to eat, but she thought that doing so required tools to obtain and process them that of course she didn't have. So instead she sat on the beach watching the lowering sun, waiting for rescue to arrive.

https://dragcave.net/user/Bellumsaur13 · by **Saurisisia** » Sat Jan 18, 2014 3:52 pm

A good deal of time passed as Brutus remained seated on the rock, thinking over about how he got in that coffin-like contraption, who he truly was before ending up here, and where had he come from. As he sat here, he thought of vague memories of his past, remembering a trip of some sort and a female voice calling out for his name. He rubbed his head, as that was all he could remember right now though he assumed more memories will come back to him eventually. Feeling rested after his escape, Brutus gets up and scans the extant of the rock wall that stood several dozen feet away, searching for some way to climb up the rock wall.

It didn't take him long to notice a notches in the rock that were clearly sapientmade and clearly designed for a foot or a hand to grab on to which led from his ledge all the way to the top of the cliff. He began climbing up the cliffside, making sure to stick to the notches and grasp tightly on them to ensure he didn't slip or fall off, though the climb was rather sluggish. The notches were apparently designed for primate-like feet, which were rather small in comparison to Brutus's own digitgrade feet, which meant they could barely fit in them and thus he had a harder time climbing as a result. But finally, he made to the top of the cliff and took a moment to catch a breath before scanning his surroundings, seeing that he was clearly on the top of a small mountain which was covered in shrubbery (with the occasional tree here and there). It also appeared that the landmass he was on was an island since there seemed to be nothing but wide open ocean surrounding the land as far as he could see.

He began walking forward, inspecting the top of the mountain for anything of use or anything to help him figure out where he was or how he got here. Brutus noticed a black shape that stood by the edge of the cliffs on one corner, nearly hidden among the shrubbery, it looked small with several tall spires on one side. Investigating it, he concluded that it may have been some sort of weather forecast device and upon closer inspection, it seemed to be run down, as if it hadn't been turned on in a while. Unfortunately, there was nothing he could use or could check for any stored data and he had no idea how to turn the device on or if it even had anything truly useful stored in its database. So, he moved on, deciding to check out the other end of the mountaintop to see if there was anything else of note there.

by **PyroOfMordor** » Sat Jan 18, 2014 5:15 pm

A loud noise sounded as a spray of mist hit Oliver Langston's face. "What in the hell..." He muttered, as he noticed couldn't move his arms, as his glasses steamed up. He heard a scraping, metallic noise as light entered the dark capsule. He was blinded for a couple of seconds, as his eyes adjusted to the light. He felt a pressure release from his arms, as he took off his glasses and wiped them. He got up, and stretched his arms and legs. He scratched as his back, as he got up. The capsule was on its side, as it was being hit by pounding waves from the beach. He saw a large cliff in front of him, a sheer drop if you were on top of it. He began walking to the left, thinking about the capsule. He heard a small noise, and saw a man on top of a small mountain. "HEY!" He yelled.

by **Sunset** » Sat Jan 18, 2014 5:32 pm

Pushing the raft ahead of her, Kat walked out into the surf until it was up to her waist. This was going to be the interesting part. She had to balance pushing the raft and making sure it didn't tip with pushing herself through that odd half-walking, half-swimming stage where your feet want to touch the bottom but you should be swimming and you don't want to bang your toes on the bottom.

"At least the water is warm," she noted as she moved ever deeper.

There were some small reefs between her and the next island, the coral feeding on the tiny plankton that the current funneled through the channel, but she had picked a point where there was a break. By the time she reached it, she was swimming free, sometimes holding the raft in front of her like a board, and sometimes pushing it with one hand while the other stroked before switching to the other for a while. Looking forward wasn't that interesting so she watched the reef crawl past instead, brightly colored fish darting here and there among the riotous profusion of coral growths.

Past the reefs now and there was nothing but open ocean on either side so she flipped onto her back and tried swimming that way but a couple nasty whacks against the raft and a near-capsize and she decided that wasn't a good idea. Another flip and she looked down instead. She was getting close to the next island and the sandy bottom spread out in front of her, dotted here and there with stones or shells. The occasional fish flickered here and there, and as she watched one especially colorful fish something caught her eye.

There was a larger something in the sand and the little fish was busily working around one side of it where a depression had formed. Pushing her raft that way, Kat saw that it was some kind of fabric or a similar object, mostly buried in the sand. Whatever it was, it wasn't very far down and she pushed herself down and reached out with a foot to grab it with her toes, the digits wrapping around and through whatever it was. Bobbing to the surface, she pulled her foot up and reached down to pull whatever it was up and onto the raft.

"A net! Sorry little fishie! Mine now!"

Thin and light, made of some kind of artificial material, it was a nice medium sized net. There were weights at the corners, again made of some artificial material, and she pushed the whole thing up onto the raft before looking down again. There was something else down there, something that had been trapped under the net or perhaps trapped in it, and she pushed herself down again.

It took several attempts to grab whatever it was and when she did, she dropped it. A shape edge or point gouged into one of her toes and she reflexively pulled away. Pushing herself back to the surface she pulled the toe up for an inspection. It wasn't bad, just a prick, but it hurt in the salty water.

"I've bleed for it, so I'm getting it!"

This time she looked, judged the distance, and dived. Her hand closed around something and her hand closed around something round and textured. Holding it away from her, she kicked for the surface but as she did, she felt something brushing against her legs seemingly at random.

'A fish?' she thought, but she kicked faster in case it was something larger than a fish.

It turned out to be a cord, nearly identical to the cord that made up the net and the item it was attached to was some kind of spear. A short, split-tipped head with two sharp prongs on the inside had been what had gouged her; On the other end was the cord with a loop at the end. It was about the length of her leg and had a textured bit at the base of the tip and the rest was smooth.

"I don't see myself doing any fishing, but you never know. Especially with no one else around."

Stashing the spear between the net and the bin, she headed for shore again. A few more minutes and her feet were touching the bottom and then she was pushing through waist-high water to the shore.

"Now, how am I gonna carry all this?"

She'd left her bin at the arch when she'd gone for the table (and her hat) but now she needed to cross the island.

"Guess I'll drag it."

The bin was already lashed down so she shook the sand off the net, stuck the spear in the bin, and threw the net over the whole thing. Then, pulling the raft-table behind her, she trudged up the beach to near the grass and turned to begin her traversal of the island. It wasn't much distance saved, but it would let her keep an eye on both the sand and the grass for anything useful as she went.

She was nearly to the other side of the island when she found something useful, but it wasn't the useful that she had thought she'd find. There was someone sitting on the ground near the sand, looking out towards the ocean, and as she spotted the someone, the someone spotted her! Tall and thin, with white skin and small black horns, she was wearing something that... itched... at the back of Kat's head. Clothing of some specific kind. She was also a good half-leg taller than her as well, but she was someone and that meant there might be someone else too!

"Hello!"

by **Bearington** » Sat Jan 18, 2014 6:10 pm

Jorin woke to total darkness. His head was throbbing, and he couldn't feel his legs. There wasn't much air left in the...in the....

What is this? What am I inside of? Where am I?

The panic set in before he could worry too much about it. Out. He had to get out of this place.

He slammed his palms against the shell of the...whatever it was. It gave no sign of opening up. He slammed again, and again, and again until finally the metal creaked, groaned, and started to swing outward. He wanted to prop his feet against the shell and kick it open, but he still couldn't feel his legs. Fresh air was coming in through the shell now, and the panic was starting to subside. After a few gasping breaths, he went to work on the shell again and widened the gap between the door and the rest of the...thing. Light was spilling in now, and Jorin saw that his container looked a lot like a coffin.

It almost was my coffin. The air filter must have broken.

How do I know that?

After some more resting and slamming, he finally managed to get the coffin thing open and tumbled out onto the floor. He was on the floor of a building. Well, it used to be a building. Now it looked more like the inside of a dollhouse, only instead of a wall that swung out on its hinges to let you spy on the dolls and their little rooms, the wall was just gone.

Dollhouses. Just like the one Sarah used to have. She loved...she...who was she? How do I know her?

The thought slipped away before he could get a grip on it. It seemed that if his memory was going to return, it wasn't going to happen just yet.

He didn't see any ground outside the wall, so he was probably on a higher floor of the building. He saw now why his head had hurt so much - his coffin thing was precariously placed on a pile of rubble such that the whole contraption was upside down. That was probably why he hadn't felt his legs, too. They were starting to throb now, too. He wished he could get down to street level and find out what was going on, but he still couldn't move his legs.

Maybe it's not such a great idea to leave, anyway. Who knows what's happening out there.

And so, Jorin waited.

OCC: I'm brand new to rp'ing and I only skimmed the opening page (I'll read more thoroughly later), so please forgive me if it takes me a bit to get my sea legs!

by **Tseaby** » Sat Jan 18, 2014 9:21 pm

The young woman weakly walked out into the grass, turning around to see just what kind of a room she was in. It was scorched on what she dubbed the front of it, and somewhat around the sides, one of which was the side the door was on. The room she was in made up the majority of it, with a bit of what seemed like crawl space on the front. It was obviously sheared off from something else, now crumpled slightly against the side of a hill. Judging by the long groove leading up to it in the grass, it likely landed at a shallow angle.

Landed? She came from the sky? She pondered it for a moment, but couldn't think of whether that was correct or not. Maybe, then. Alright, I'm probably a sky person. That's sort of cool... Myself! She immediately realized she hadn't checked to see if she was okay yet. Sitting down on a large rock nearby she closed her eyes for a minute and let herself soak in the sunlight. She rubbed her arms, still feeling the good tingling sensation, although a lot less intense than it was before. It was nice with the cool breeze coming along the hillside.

Finally she stretched and looked over herself. She was wearing a simple matte black, or maybe more dark gray jumpsuit. It was a bit thin, though, and with how form fitting it was didn't do much to hide her body's features. She wasn't exactly sizable but she had decent curves for a woman of her height. Which was... what again? Judging by the doorway she was on the shorter side of things, but that didn't mean anything. Well, what else... socks. She's got her socks on. Hair! She glanced up and didn't see anything. She turned her head. Oh, right. Running a hand through hair she found it was cut short. It wasn't a buzz cut, but it was more boyish than she expected since she is a girl. Is that a good assumption, though? Should it be longer? Feh.

She held out her hands, looking at them. Short trimmed nails. A bit rough on the palms. Running a thumb over the underside of her pinkie finger she wondered about the small scar on it. Her mind blanked and for a minute she just sat there in the sun, enjoying it again. She started rubbing a bicep, not particularly noteworthy, as a noise off in the distance snapped her attention back to the cityscape ahead of her. She seemed to be in a large park area, although it could very well be the outskirts from all she could see at the foot of the hill. The closest buildings were short, but farther away they loomed high above the ground. She frowned. If there's someone there then they can tell her what the heck is going on or so help her she'd... she'd... Do something! Augh!. She sighed, resting her face on her palm for a moment, before hefting herself from the rock in an overly dramatic fashion, and started walking back to the room to see just what it contained while there was sunlight out.

by **The Lunar Underground** » Sun Jan 19, 2014 12:23 am

As moon looks over the maps there's a knock on the door,
"Sir the radars picking up the enemies troops moving to fire canyon."
"So....they finally slip up." moon utters to himself.
As moon rushes to the door the radar sirens go off,
"Trooper whats the radar's status!"
"Critical sir they are about to go in to the canyon they might found one of our training camps!"
Moon studies the monitor feed from the radar and looks back to the trooper.
"That's a H.V convoy its just transporting the high general and leader of their nation. But we can't alert the troops station there until they pass they are jamming radio signals."
The trooper looks away then back to moon,
"What about the O.W.S sir? Its our only hope to alert them in time!"
Moon looks at the trooper concerned,
"Are you mad? that means we have gone on the offensive!"
"But sir, with this move will be on the offensive!"
"I guess we have no option."
As moon sighs he mutters.
"why do we have to launch it now?"
"Pardon sir?"
"Launch the Over Watch Systems I want all units active! Once we take out this H.V convoy then this nation will be ours to take!"
All the personnel looks at moon with triumphant looks and cheers as all systems were announced "a go"
"After this men we will be free but; I want the leader alive....I want to finish him my self."
"Yes sir! You shall have that pleasure sir!"
"Good I will be in the radar communication room if you need me"
Moon then turns to the door of the radar room and walks out. Hiding the fact his left red eye is glowing reveling his darker side was in control during that order.

by **Karcharis** » Sun Jan 19, 2014 1:18 am

"͖͔̱̝͘͠H͙̞͓̝̗e҉̥̭l͏͖̻̥͍̜̩̘ͅl̶̻̯̜̖̱̬ǫ̥̝͇̬͎!̀҉̲̜̥̹̘̝̙͘ͅͅ"͈̘̲͔

Syrinx looked at the other person, and got to her feet. The other person looked odd, short and hornless with bizarrely hypertrophied mammaries. But the fact that she looked odd was not evidence of much, given that Syrinx seemed to have entered existence this afternoon with a vast number of gaps in her mind. Perhaps people were supposed to look like this, and she'd somehow been created wrong? Was it possible that the lacunae in her memory could hide an entire assembly of personages looking like this? Or perhaps this person, like her, was newly created, and both of them were entirely unique in the universe. That appeared to be the case so far, at least; there was only one of each of them.

It didn't seem right that Syrinx couldn't understand her, though; again, some personal flaw in her construction, or something entirely ordinary? She had the feeling that she should be able to understand people when they spoke. That seemed like a necessary prerequisite to being Syrinx the Cunning.

The person did not look much like a rescuer to Syrinx's eyes (standard caveats about the paucity of experience against which to compare these intuitions - take that as a given from now on, Syrinx). That was disappointing - but at least the existence of two people implied the existence of more-than-two people overall, some of whom might be rescuers. So that was a positive."

"Hello!" she essayed in return - and, when that seemed as incomprehensible to the other person as that person's speech had seemed to her, she began at the universal ground level of foreign communications, pointing a thumb at herself and saying "Syrinx". She left off "the Cunning", because right now it hardly seemed to apply, and "Executor-Aspirant", because she didn't know what it was.

by **The Elsani City States** » Sun Jan 19, 2014 8:27 am

Oh!
The smell of a fire meant danger. Trouble coming, unless-oh, there it is. Food cooking. Food means others, means a social closeness this green woman is apparently hardwired to seek. This gives new urgency to Ae'^Na's searching the construction site for basics. She of newly braided hair and a growing hunger would rummage through the long, low-set building that seems the central one here.
Hurry, hurry
As if a burglar rifling through a home she would knock over plastic containers and uproot bits and pieces she thought might contain something needed. It's only when she shakes a bit of kitchen equipment a little too hard and it sprays water at her that she considers that she might need to slow down. The spray is weak, but it means there was a tank thereof nearby. Grabbing one of the many little plastic containers she'd knocked over in her search, she fills it before that spray peters out.
Couple liters at most. Even then, the container isn't full. She got lucky, in that the experience taught her a valuable lesson-she won't be so lucky in the future.
She needs to find food, more water, and shelter, and all she has to go on is that fire in the distance.
Now she has a destination. A goal.
Before departing from that ransacked construction site Ae^Na would pause at the pipes she'd propped up against debris earlier. Something pokes at the back of her mind that these could be useful, could be made into something-and so takes a single piece of that plastic-like pipe and sets about gouging bits out of it upon a sharp piece of metal in that mound of debris. It isn't until she's fashioned a crude wind instrument out of the material-a pipe with a number of small holes in it-that she truly stops to think about what she's done.

A Who am I? she wonders at the poor man's flute. Still. She's torn away from her wonderings by a pang of hunger, and decides to set out for that fire's location with container of water and instrument in tow.
A wary look at the buildings and fallen debris she passes by as she makes her way to it, as if they might contain any number of monsters about to leap out and devour her-but onwards she continues. Striking up an awkward sound on that pipe she quickly settles into a practiced tune. A happy little thing she doesn't quite understand, a melody she doesn't remember learning.

She's good at it. Perhaps she was a musician, or at least had done well in childhood music lessons. At the least, it would serve to alert potential others to her location, and moreso to them as she would near that fire.

by **Sunset** » Sun Jan 19, 2014 12:06 pm

"Hey Syrinx, I'm Kat," she waved. "Who are you? I don't know who I am, but maybe you know who you are?"

While they talked, Kat pulled her raft up onto the grass to make a sort of seat and began to sort through her stuff. The net was mostly clean, whatever artificial material it was made of having prevented anything but minor damage, and she knotted a couple severed strands together before folding it up and putting it aside. The spear didn't need any work at all but the tip of the spear, being very sharp, presented the interesting question of carrying it around.

"I found this on the bottom, just on the other side of the island," Kat informed Syrinx as she worked. "I guess that means there had to be someone there in the past to lose it, doesn't it?

Setting the spear aside, she turned to the fruit. It had survived the trip mostly intact, aside from a couple that had been bruised when they'd whacked into the side of the bin or the spear when she'd been dragging the raft. She took a bite of one and held the other out, "Here, have one."

"So, what are you doing? I'm going to head towards that pillar of smoke over there," Kat pointed towards the headland off in the distance. The smoke was thinner now, but there was a distinct trace of it over the barely visible white mushroom shapes. "It might mean other people, or it could just be fire."

Fire meaning heat and warmth. Something to sleep near and to cook food over. Though she didn't really have food that needed to be cooked yet. Finishing the fruit, she considered the hard pit. Should she plant it? There seemed to be plenty of the small shrubs that had produced it nearby, so there didn't seem to be a good reason. Still... She threw it into the grass.

What else to do while they talked?

There were plenty of the five-five-five plants around and she took the spear and began cutting big armfuls of the fronds, stacking them in the arms of the convenient Syrinx. Once she had quite a few she began by making a framework from the longest and then weaving a simple, circular basket through it. It was easy work and something to do with her hands while they talked.

by **Scolopendra** » Sun Jan 19, 2014 12:12 pm

She--given what she'd figured out so far, she had dubbed herself The Electrician, given her penchant for articles and nouns in naming schemes--and the man she'd dubbed in her head 'The Miner' were up on the rooftop looking around when she heard it. What they were looking around for was uncertain; she knew of power sources but specifics were eluding her at the moment, which she found annoying as she was The Electrician. Still, if she were actually The Electrician she'd recognize it when she saw it and yes, it has not been forgotten, she heard it.

Toot-tootly-tooting music. Someone was playing a... tootly... thing. A musical instrument of tootly properties. 'Woodwind' came to mind but it seemed too vague. The specificity of her recall started to grow annoying, then she ignored the annoyance and looked around for the source of the tootling, naturally heading towards her signal fire since that made sense.

Past the fire, down the street, she saw another person, another woman. From this distance The Electrician could judge that this newcomer was green, like her, but slighter and smaller. The Electrician walked over to the Miner, gently tapped him on the upper arm at arm's length (in case he should react poorly), then motioned for him to follow her over to the corner of the building, where she pointed out the newcomer.

"HELLO!" The Electrician shouted, cupping her hands around her mouth. "I HOPE YOU'RE NOT DEAF TOO." After she said it she realized it wasn't really a sensitive thing to say but in all honesty it'd be difficult test-to-speeching with more than one deaf-mute around, especially since she didn't have any more portable glass-hexagon-computers. The word 'tablet' suddenly came to mind to substitute 'glass-hexagon-computer' and it made sense. Hurrah for that.

by **The Elsani City States** » Sun Jan 19, 2014 1:20 pm

A look of confusion on Ae'Na's features, that music dying. By now she was fairly dusty and that torn jumpsuit discarded almost entirely, strips thereof reshaped into lengths of grey cloth bound about bosom and elsewise. This does far more to preserve her modesty than the suit. It occurs to her that she understands the concept but does not remember from where or when she learnt such-before she gazes up at the Electrician and the Miner.

People!
And perhaps even friendly ones. She seems to instinctively regard others as such to begin with. As short as she is. Definitely she is moreso than either. Light brown hair, in a braid. Clothing that looks like a more conservative two piece than anything, obviously constructed of the remnants of some earlier garment. Jug of..water? It looks like, bound by that same cloth at her hip. She raises her free hand and waves, the other clutching a length of pipe that looks like it might be the source of that tootling.

At least her right arm is healed enough. She looks to be in good shape otherwise.
"DEAF?" she calls out, curious beyond reason. "NO!" Of these new /others/, of how she might reach them. She looks as if she might just climb-just how agile are her kind, anyway?-before sense returns to her and she calls out a proper answer. "Need help! Lost and unsure."

Definitely another pod-person.

by **Bearington** » Sun Jan 19, 2014 1:24 pm

Jorin waited.

As he waited, he planned. There was no telling what exactly had happened to everybody, but it seemed like he was the only one around. It wouldn't be long before he needed to start exploring. It would be nighttime soon, and he needed to find some shelter. He was exposed on what had become the roof of the building. Vulnerable to the elements and whatever else was out there. He needed to water too, and food eventually. When the feeling returned to his legs, he examined the coffin thing. It made sense to him, somehow. He recognized it, but he didn't. He had no idea how he had gotten inside, or why the thing was there in the first place. He couldn't imagine why it was in this building or why there weren't any others in the immediate vicinity. In a sense it utterly confused him, yet he had the feeling that he could take the whole thing apart and put it back together again if he needed to.

He didn't need to. He knew enough about the pod to realize that it wasn't functioning anymore, and a cursory inspection revealed nothing particularly useful inside. The rubble of the building around him was useless, too. There were a few broken tables or desks or something, and papers scattered all around. The remnants of the obliterated wall littered the floor. If there was anything worth salvaging in here it was too far buried to be worth his time. If there had ever been a set of stairs that led to the ground floor, it wasn't accessible anymore. Luckily, he only seemed to be on the third floor of the building.

Jorin decided to get moving as quickly as possible and started to work his way down the wall until his feet hit solid, natural ground. He still wasn't sure where he was. His surroundings weren't familiar, but that wasn't strange considering he didn't remember anything about himself other than his name, either. There was no way of knowing where he ought to go, so he decided to just pick a direction. Just as he was about to start walking, he heard a sound in the distance. It wasn't a very pronounced sound, but the rest of the wasteland around him was mostly silent. It sounded like...something kind of instrument. As quickly as it started, it had stopped, and he didn't hear it pick up again. He couldn't tell exactly where it had been coming from, but he turned in the general direction of the toot-tootly-tooting and he walked.

by **Tseaby** » Sun Jan 19, 2014 8:11 pm

There was nothing in it. Well, that's not entirely true. There were things... The burned console, counter tops, hooks and anchor points for smaller things that weren't there. Empty cabinets. Surely if all this happened in an accident there should be some things in it. Well, there were two things. A box and the pod. The box, however, was locked, and the pod appeared attached to the room. She felt like she shouldn't be leaving either of those behind, but she again didn't know why.

Things. Having the right things. Being prepared. Prepared. She should prepare for traveling into the city. She unbuckled the foot locker from its tie-downs and dragged it outside. She knelt in front it and stared at the lock. It was an external four-digit pad-lock. 0 0 0 0. Nope. 1 2 3 4. Nope. 8 8 8 8. Click. WHAT. That seemed horribly wrong to her that those numbers were the combination. However, for some reason she chose to use them and they worked. That meant somehow she had known what it was, and was some how related to his box. She slowly opened it, afraid as to what she might find in it.

Wires. And things attached to wires. She smiled, but then frowned trying to thing why she was smiling. It all seemed fairly fancy and high-tech, and could conceivably come in handy, but at the moment she didn't know what to do with it. She rummaged and found a shiny blue rolled up... item. With wires coming out of it. It seemed more important than the rest of it, but if that was important then the rest probably was too. There was a few pounds of small items in it, but below where two large black rectangular containers. Containers? No, they were themselves items. She knew they were useful but she didn't know why. Why don't I know so much? Why do I know I don't know so much? She closed the lid, hesitating before making it click fully shut.

Getting back up, she walked up to the pod and looked over it. It did seem important. At least, she had a feeling something in it was important. She felt around the underside of the pod and the stand until she found latches, and pulling at them released the pod with a 'click' from its stand on one side. She walked around and did the same thing on the other side. The little green light and the strip lighting went out. Grabbing a hold of the side she grunted, heaving it down off the stand. It was surprisingly light for its size so despite the bulk she managed to lower it to the floor and dragged it outside, too.

There. Now she could put the locker in the pod, close the pod, and drag it with her. Except she'd need straps first. Darn it. She leaned down and felt around the inside of the pod. A little hatch at the bottom stored some thin footwear padded decently on the bottom, and very thin jacket, and a hat. They didn't feel familiar to her. Combined with the same indiscernible insignia on the hat and jacket, she assumed they were standard issue. Standard issue. That rang a bell, but she wasn't sure why, and snorted in frustration at once again not being able to remember. She wiped off the bottom of her socks, fairly clean from the dry grass she was walking on, and slipped on the shoes. She pulled the straps to tighten them, then reached over and grabbed the hat. She punched it back into shape, the brim of the bush hat slightly smaller on the sides than the front and back, which struck her as odd, but put it on nonetheless. She left the jacket in the pod and lugged the locker into it, before walking back towards the room.

There's nothing in the room, but how about in the bit in front of the room? She looked and saw wiring and piping going into the semi-open wall. The pipes wouldn't be useful, but if the wiring was long enough she could fashion some straps out of them. She carefully reached into the hole and grabbed one of the wires, and getting a firm grip yanked at it. Something snapped and she fell backwards onto rear, but she was victorious, a good portion of the wire now laying before her. She got back up, again, started pulling the rest of it out. It was a good 15 feet or so. She did the same with another wire, although without the falling this time, and now had two good lengths of not too thick and fairly flexible and sturdy rubber coated wiring. She rocked the pod partially onto its side and looped one wire around both of the hooks that had previously held it in place, making sure each tail was mostly even. Then she tied a knot midway down the tail, then looping it around her waist and tying it in the front, completing a crude harness, and tossed the second wire into the pod before closing it.

Well, this will suck. At least I don't have to run. For some reason the thought of having to do a long walk instead of a shorter run was more comforting to her. Holding the from brim of her hat down a little to block the sun, she studied the skyline of the city. Nothing in particular about it stood out compared to the rest, but she kept seeing something in the sky, although she couldn't make out was it was. The city didn't look so good, but she sure as heck wasn't going to stay in an overgrown park. Should she be doing something else? Probably. She couldn't tell. With how dry the grass was in spots it certainly didn't seem like she'd last too long staying out here anyway. So with a short sigh she started walking, the grass crunching underneath her as she made her way to towards the looming structures.

by **Scolopendra** » Sun Jan 19, 2014 8:16 pm

Despite the situation, The Electrician smiled and laughed to herself, once again shaking her head as she did when she learned that The Miner was just as lost as her. Then she cupped her hands to her mouth once more. "GOOD NEWS AND BAD NEWS. BAD NEWS IS, SAME HERE. GOOD NEWS IS, WE'RE STARTING A..." Her brain bounced. She was well on her way to making an excellent joke but of course she couldn't remember what would be the right thing to reference, though there were things that would be appropriate, if she knew them. She switched gears to full seriousness. "...TEAM."

She took a breath. "MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME IN THE STORE DOWN THERE. MIND THE BROKEN GLASS. WE'LL BE RIGHT DOWN." After making sure she had The Miner's attention, she pointed down and then to the roof access door.

(OOC: and if, Midlonia, you want to take the next lead, feel free to assume The Electrician follows you.)

Breaking the Seal... (Character, Any!)

"Where Is Everybody?"

Friendship is Magic (w/ Midlonia)

Rooftop Patrol!

Walk this way

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