THE CRASH

[ataraxites]

CHARACTERS: Any and all.
LOCATION: Medical and beyond.
WARNINGS: Violence, implied (and possibly explicit) nakedness.
SUMMARY: Arrival in the crashed Tranquility

W E L C O M E You wake up, alone in the dark. There's a breathing tube jammed down your trachea, and you're suspended in a tube of clear blue fluid. Through the fog you can see shadows of movement, the muted sound of alarms crying. Upon registering your level of consciousness, the gravity couch drains the fluid surrounding you and retracts the breathing apparatus; the doors in front of you open, and you're suddenly dropped several feet onto the opposite wall. The impact is painful, winds you, and it takes several seconds to overcome and persuade uncooperative limbs to move. You barely have the time for it. All around you is chaos: the sirens of alarms are shrieking in your ears, drowning out the cries of confusion from the people awakening around you, trapped in their gravity couches or stumbling through the wreckage. Louder than that is a deep rumbling, coming from somewhere farther away, vibrating through the metal underneath you. It's hard to make out much of anything in the dim red light, but you catch sight of a sprawl of garbled black on your forearm and wonder-- Who are you? How did you get here? A drip lands on your cheek. Another. You look up as a flash of light illuminates a rend in the outer wall high above you, a steadily increasing fall of raindrops showering through. Another rumble rolls through the wreckage around you, and you pull weak, unsteady legs underneath you, rising to a shaky stand. M E D I C A L There's a shout, nearby, and your attention turns from the hole high in the wall to the room around you. Standing sideways, the smooth doors of gravity couches under your feet, fallen wreckage and debris making obstacles in your path. But there are others here, climbing through it as best they can, or trapped inside their gravity couches, injured, or worse. You step over the body of a man in a jumpsuit, venturing further into the gloom of red. The shout comes again. Someone might need your help. Or they might have answers about what happened here. O U T S I D E It takes all the strength you have to climb up through the fallen structural beams and hanging cabling, metal slipping wet beneath your fingers and feet. Eventually you emerge, and in another flash of bright light realise you stand on the shell of some colossal structure, the shadows of dense jungle all around you. The night sky above is a violent flux of colors, a dense, roiling tower of cloud crawling with lightning as if on fire, thunder booming again and again as the deluge pours down. In the brief flashes of light you start to notice figures, further away, scattered across the shell. Dressed in dark jumpsuits, their shouts are drowned out by the storm, but their struggles are evident; lashing out, grappling, fighting each other for their lives. There's a sound behind you, and as you turn one lunges towards you, a jagged shaft of metal in his hand. His eyes are wide, teeth bared, and as you stagger back he yells something, coming for you again: "You did this!" N O T E S Venturing through the medbay will discover the lockers and main bay, all heavily damaged. Characters will likely be able to salvage some belongings from the destroyed lockers - otherwise they will be able to find jumpsuits and other standard clothing in the wreckage. The alarms will cut after two hours, a which point a looping audio message telling passengers to make their way to the blue lifts will be audible. The lifts, if investigated, will be missing, leaving only empty elevator shafts. The nexus of the strange superstorm will disperse out into colorful clouds after approximately half an hour, at which point rainfall will ease to something less torrential. The storm will pass entirely after five hours. Dawn will come two hours after this. The Tranquility's original crew members can be found amongst player characters, either in medical or outside of the ship already. They will similarly be suffering from memory loss, but worse than that, a small number of them will be extremely violent in attacking player characters, other crew, or even harming themselves.

Comments

[doggedly]

"Don't fall."

Helpful commentary from behind, as Carlisle stumbles. Sirius is no more coordinated, but he grins anyways. Even under the grime and slime of his post-crash awakening, it's still, somehow, a nice grin. A little grim; a little more like a grimace. Still nice.

When is a good time to take the piss out of someone, post-crash, near-death, amnesiac. Once you've found a pair of jeans, at least. Sirius has got those, with bonus weird stick in his pocket. There's a drip of blood rolling its way down his forehead, from somewhere in his hairline. That's why he's here, leaned--temporarily--against the wall. It won't last long.

Friendly-like, he raises his eyebrows. This is, probably, not the time for this. And yet. "You go down, you might not get up again, yeah?"

[tongueamok]

Carlisle turns on his heel, startled -- as it turns out, that's a terrible reaction to have, as he trips over his own ankle and ends up flat on his rear. One arm goes behind him to try to cushion his fall, while the other wraps reflexively around his middle, instinct telling him to protect himself from dangers unknown. His eyes trail down himself for a fraction of a second, surprise in his brow -- he's not sure why he protected that spot, given it's his head that's throbbing.

"R- right," he agrees, his gaze returning to the grinning stranger as he tried to muster a wry smile of his own, but was too nervous to do so. "Though you look in worse shape than I do."

How anyone can grin when everything around them is falling apart is beyond him, especially when injured. That wound is what catches Carlisle's eye though, his focus locking on the trail of blood making its way down the stranger's forehead. The longer he stares, the more aware he becomes of a sensation in his hands, an electric tingling that snakes its way from his palms to his fingertips.

But staring is rude, and his manners kick in somewhere along the way. He does a poor job of covering for them by asking a question of his own: "Do you know what's going on?"

[doggedly]

Worse shape. He shrugs, as blithely as he can. The angle of his lean against the wall makes it a bit more of a struggle than it actually is, injuries and unsure strength and double-unsure surroundings and all.

"S' relative, innit." Shape, that is. Idly, almost as an afterthought, Sirius reaches up and wipes at his forehead with his wrist, smearing the blood sideways. Scavenging hasn't turned up a shirt just yet. He isn't sure that he cares to hang around in here and locate one. The air from this direction is warm. What that means, who knows, but at least he won't freeze to death.

"No idea what's going on, though." Like his grin, the statement has grim amusement threaded through it. Like, if we don't laugh, we'll probably go mental, so let's stay safely here. He doesn't actually move to help Carlisle to his feet. That's not the work of amnesia, or injury. That's just his personality. 'I s'ppose by your question I ought to assume that you've not got any idea either. Which is too bad 'cos I've been hanging around here hoping that the next person who comes along will have any idea. Are you going to stay on the floor all day?"

Or maybe the wall. Everything is pretty sideways.

[tongueamok]

"No," Carlisle answers, picking himself off the floor, or the wall, or whatever it is that's beneath him. The hand that had been holding him up moves to his head, stopping before it gets there -- it's probably better he doesn't go feeling for his own injuries, especially with his palms tingling like they are. That current running through his hands is starting to feel like fire at his fingertips, a spark desperately trying to escape. He's neither sure of what it is, nor if he wants to trust it at this moment, given the circumstances. Perhaps with his memory will come answers.

That's if his memory returns, of course.

"It looks like this building collapsed," he notes, his eyes back on that smeared blood and away again in a second. Down to the floor they go, using his musing as an excuse to stay off the stranger. "But a building forged of steel? Is that possible?"

[doggedly]

"Skyscrapers." Sirius lets his head loll back on his shoulders so he can stare up toward whatever part of the corridor is serving as the ceiling. The crap ceiling, that is, since there's rainwater everywhere. "You're trying to be funny,right. C'mon, mate. Even I know: skyscrapers. They make 'em all out of steel. Mental."

Is it? It is, but he wouldn't be able to say why, if someone were to ask him. Nor could he explain the separation of they in that explanation. With a faint scowl of his own, he rubs his wrist at his forehead yet again.

"Dunno if that's what this is. But, steel or stone, it's a bloody wreck. You going to be all right to get out? No tripping allowed. Not unless you want to end up a stain crushed under one of these beams."

He pats the wall behind him, somewhat bracingly. Merlin, but what happened here, anyways. Again, Sirius takes stock of the surroundings. Again, he scrubs his wrist at his forehead. Mental.

From somewhere deep in the ship, metal groans, low. Something has shifted. Sirius raises his eyebrows again.

[tongueamok]

His gaze follows the stranger's, taking to where the ceiling should have been. Rain is coming down upon them, trickling through the broken beams and torn wiring. Carlisle can't recall what a skyscraper is for the life of him, though he gets the distinct feeling even if his memory was in perfect working order, the term would be foreign to him. Why is that? Why is it that he thinks that the idea of a building made of steel sounds impossible, while this stranger treats it as if it's commonplace?

Feeling dreadfully inadequate in ways he can't explain, Carlisle swallows down his irritation, his hands curling themselves into fists. He can only be mad at himself for so long -- there are more important things to worry about now, as the wreckage reminds them with a groan. It reverberates through the floor, sending a jolt through his legs, up his spine, and into his memory. He can't die. He doesn't want to die.

And so they need to get out, he tells himself. Answers will have to wait.

"I... should be okay to get out," he replies hesitantly, "though I don't know what kind of a climber I am. His eyes fall again, landing on a body that's lying down the corridor from them, one half-covered by debris and darkness: they're wearing a jumpsuit, something far different from the clothing he and the stranger have on. He takes a few steps toward the figure, going to check on their condition; even before kneeling beside them, he already knows.

"What can we do about the others, though?" he asks, his brow knitting. There's a corpse not an arm's length from him, but he feels no trepidation, no surprise. Perhaps he's used to that sight, he ponders, his teeth gritting behind his lips -- that's not an encouraging thought.

[doggedly]

There have been a handful of others scattered around on the path to this particular spot. Some of them alive, some of them dead, just like their unfortunate companion. Sirius lets his head roll on his neck as he looks over at Carlisle, crouched beside the body.

If you take the jumpsuit as a uniform--which is what he assumes at a glance, and that's good; uniforms make everything easy to sort out--they're very separate from the corpse. Whatever that means.

"Dunno." But he ought to know. A latent sense of heroism flickers in his chest, like a flame that's trying to catch. He rubs his hand over his mouth. Stubble pricks at his skin. Merlin, but he wants-- something. It's a craving. The word doesn't come to him. He moves on. "Some of 'em will make it out on their own all right. They were moving about back there." More or less. "This one's going to have to fend for himself I think. Whatever happens to this place, he'll get his burial one way or another. Not everyone can say that. Cigarettes," he realises aloud, suddenly and out of nowhere. The name for what he's craving. His hand goes to his chest, like to check a pocket that isn't there. "Bollocks."

[tongueamok]

"Cigarettes?" Another unfamiliar term, and one that seems to have no place in the stranger's speech regarding the corpses. Carlisle sighs, turning his attention back to the body. This one wasn't too much older than him, from the looks of it. Dying young is not a good way to go.

The lad's colorless, frightened visage draw's Carlisle's gaze to his eyes -- though unseeing, their stare pierces him anyway, a wave of guilt he can't quite place welling in his gut. He reaches to close them, hoping the last thing the poor guy saw wasn't his end coming for him. "This isn't a proper burial, but it wi—"

He freezes as his fingers connect with the dead:

Darkness everywhere -- oppressive, unending darkness surrounds him as he tears down the hallway, running for his life. Fear drives him, moves him; he has to get away. In the pitch blackness is screaming, yelling, howling; it echoes through the corridor, inhuman in quality, bestial as the gap closes between predator and prey. Someone is coming.

Breath hitches, chest hurting from running, hands bruised from using them to try and find a way out. The walls are hot, but the air is worse, his throat burning as he drinks it in. Sweat pours from his brow, making its way down his face, letting him know he's still alive. Someone is coming. Someone is coming, closer and closer, and he has to find a way to defend himself. He won't be alive for much longer if he doesn't.

A voice -- not his own -- begs, pleads for his life as the footsteps draw closer. Get away. Get away! Someone is coming, and there is no turning back now. It's kill or be killed, and he'll tear someone apart with his own hands if he has to. He lashes into the darkness with a cry of his own, and then—

What seems like several minutes for Carlisle is only a moment in time, a few frozen seconds where he stops, then trembles, then awakens to the present. He pulls away from the body, gasping for air as he clambers backwards. His eyes are wild, laced with terror as they take in his surroundings -- where was the darkness? The heat? Who was he running from?

It was a hallucination, he thinks. It had to be... didn't it?

His eyes dart to the stranger, worry written across him. "What was—?"

His question is interrupted a second later as he coughs, struggling to breath as he hacks up a vile, black liquid into his hand. It seeps between his fingers, staining the front of his tabard like ink on paper.

[doggedly]

Yeah, cigarettes, and this time it's more of a wistful thought. He's really keen on cigarettes, he's just remembered. Wistfulness swiftly replaced by bollocks, again, as he's not got any and so cannot take the edge off of the craving that is now central in his--

What?

"What?" he says, aloud.

Because of course that spare moment in time passed completely by Sirius. Previous thoughts of a nicotine fix are rather now eclipsed, first by confusion and then, more fully, by deeper confusion tinged with distant worry. Worry isn't his usual mode, so he says, a bit more dismissively, "Ri-ight," implication layered in there, are you a weirdie, because Carlisle certainly looks a right weirdie at the present moment, what with the way his face has gone all funny. Not a charitable thought but a true one all the same.

"Are you sure that you're feeling all," he starts, all right, but then cuts off into a slightly more urgent, "shiiiiiit", as worry goes right off the rails into what the bloody fuck. Because now there's black gooey sick coming out of this bloke's mouth, and Sirius shoves away from his slumped posture on the wall to-- grab hold of Carlisle's shoulders, or, something; there's a vague memory of people drown in pulmonary fluids when they're before he thinks, that's not this, and then what in the hell is a pulmonary fluid.

What he actually says is, "Don't," which is probably just about as useful a contribution to the conversation as any of the rest of the nonsensey tripe that he's thinking. "What the hell is that!"

[tongueamok]

"Don't? Don't what!? I don't know! I don't know what this is!" Carlisle wrenches away from the stranger as rising panic rings loudly in his ears, more of the black bile escaping from between his teeth. An idle thought regarding how convenient it is that that his tabard is mostly black anyway is shut down almost instantly in favor of a series of colloquial profanities and paranoid notions.

"Didn't you see that?" he asks, his memory hazy and growing worse by the minute. He couldn't remember his own name when asked, but that... vision had been so clear. The suffocating darkness, the heat in the air, breath on the back of his neck as he turned to face his pursuer— "The lights went out! You had to have seen it! I was—"

No wait, that voice hadn't been his, had it?

He coughs again, getting the last of the ooze from his throat before wiping his mouth with his sleeve, his arm trembling as he brings it to his lips. "I... I was running. I was running from someone or something in the dark, and..."

He trails off again, trepidation heavy on him as he glances back toward the stranger. He had been grinning, hadn't he? What kind of man grins in the face of such disaster?

Carlisle's brow wrinkles in discomfort. What kind of man, indeed.

[doggedly]

Sirius--stylistically sensitive, even bloody and shirtless and amnesiac--winces a little as Carlisle wipes his sleeve over his mouth. Oh, well, he thinks, resigned. At least the robe is a dark colour.

More importantly: the man in the dark coloured dark-stained robe might be a madman. This is a very serious possibility that Sirius is now having to consider, as he faces down short rambling bursts of explanation. Carlisle isn't vomiting up bile any longer, though he might start again at any moment. Sirius considers him, carefully, the same careful way you'd consider any raving lunatic who might be in some sort of danger.

As Carlisle's brief raving trails off, Sirius' expression goes a little more wary. "You're not going to be sick again, are you," he asks, cautiously leaning back a bit. "You know there's barely any lights to go out, right." He gestures upwards, toward the ruined wall-ceiling. "Are you sure you didn't just close your eyes for a moment?"

Never mind the bit about running. That one's a little more difficult to explain away. Only, now Carlisle's look has turned a bit weird, and Sirius wrinkles his nose in response.

"Look, if you are going to be sick," he warns, "don't do it on me, all right. I don't exactly fancy being a participant. Front row seats were disgusting enough."

[tongueamok]

Carlisle grits his teeth, trying to bite down that fear nagging at the back of his mind. This fellow has done nothing but try to help him, hasn't he? Answering his questions as he found his footing? Though he does seem a bit off with that grin and the fact he's completely missing a shirt, he doesn't seem deranged.

Not yet, at least. What if he's just waiting for an opportunity to attack? What if, now that there is some light, he's afraid he'll be caught?

That notion sounds silly even in Carlisle's paranoia-addled mind. Despite not knowing who he is, he can tell he's probably not much of a fighter. The very idea anyone would be afraid of him seems comical. If the stranger had wanted to attack him, he'd have done so by now. And on top of that, he can't be the one to call anyone out of their mind, given what he just saw -- or thought he saw, rather. It had seemed undeniably real, but it was a hallucination and nothing more, some figment of his imagination coloring his perception.

"Sorry," he utters quietly in response to his unsaid accusation. "Sorry, lad. I don't know what that was. Or what what this is, or... anything, really. Not even my name."

[doggedly]

Lad. The danger of bile vomit apparently passed, the raving apparently concluded, for now--current safety from both of these things means that Sirius has the opportunity to pull a face. He might not know much about himself, but he does know that he doesn't like that term. Feels too like dismissal.

"S'all right," he says, instead of protesting straight out, "I don't know mine either. It's not lad, I know that much at least, but then again I don't know what to tell you to call me, so I s'ppose I can't actually complain on that one. What d'you think could make all of us wake up in total bloody danger and ruin and also make us forget everything about ourselves?"

It's sort of a rhetorical question, as he glances back toward where they've both come from. There's a vague feeling that he ought to be more distressed by all of this--and he is, sort of. A deep groan of metal from somewhere far away echoes down their corridor. They should both really be more distressed. Ought he to have seen whatever this bloke saw?

He shoots a glance back at the stranger as he thinks that. "You were running?"

Crumbs, I missed the notif for this post. My bad!

[tongueamok]

The second groan rumbles heavily down the corridor, offering Carlisle a momentary distraction from his riled nerves. The paranoia is passing, strangely fleeting for something he'd felt so strongly during that hallucination. It doesn't make sense -- none of this does, and that only unsettles him further. He could have attributed his own amnesia to head trauma, but for both of them to have no memory of who they are or what is going on seems a very unlikely coincidence.

Well, at least he's not alone in his circumstances. There's some reprieve in that.

"I was running," Carlisle reiterates, looking both ways down the passage as he finds his footing. "It... was a hall like this one, I believe. Steel walls. Someone -- something, rather -- was chasing me in the darkness. It was unbearably hot, and... "

But the voice! "It wasn't my voice," he mumbles to himself. "I might have lost my memory, but losing a voice is much harder."

NO WORRIES i'm just slow i have no actual excuses

[doggedly]

"Well, let's have a look around," Sirius suggests, quite seriously, "perhaps you've just misplaced the voice. Could be anywhere around hereabouts."

It's a suggestion that might sound legitimate if someone were only paying attention to the tone, and not the content. He doesn't crack a smile, either, which helps to maintain that facade--but does little to add credit to his name as a sane man.

But okay so: all jokes and voice loss aside, the memory--memory? hallucination?--of being chased in the dark by a something seems something to at least be wary of. Sirius cranes his neck a bit, the better to peer down into that darkness. The groaning sound might actually be the ship, or it might actually be something else. He is not, he finds, afraid.

But.

"Getting out into the open seems a good idea, yeah?" A better suggestion than looking about for voices. He looks back at Carlisle again, a bit more firmly. "Better than hanging around down here, anyways. Seems like there's air coming from somewhere in that direction."

We can be slow together.

[tongueamok]

"Yes," Carlisle agrees quickly, trying to push his hair out of his face. "Let's at least move from this corpse. Perhaps we'll find someone who's alive, who can give us some answers."

He waits for the stranger to take the lead, wiping his hands on the underside of his tabard to get the remains of the black ooze off them. It's easier to agree with the lad, more comfortable to fall into the subordinate role, even if the one he's following is possibly a madman -- he doesn't want to be in charge, to be the one who ends up leading them both to their deaths.

And who knows what potential deaths are lurking in the darkness all around them? Probably plenty, if he's honest with himself. Perhaps ones he once knew about, back when he still knew his own name.

On the topic of names— "What shall I call you, for now?"

perfect.

[doggedly]

No idea for himself whether he's a leader or a follower, but Sirius' response is automatic: Carlisle suggests that they move on, and doesn't straightaway stride off into the darkness. Which leaves Sirius to stride off first into said darkness, which he does, with a self-assured nod. Maybe not a leader, then, but at least someone willing to lead the way into possible danger.

Names, though.

"P," he starts, and then stops himself with a from. P, and then a blank space in his head. What was he going to follow that with? Whatever it was, he knows that it wasn't right, and not just that it wasn't his name. The feeling is more specific than that, like someone clapping a hand over his mouth. Shut up shut up shut up.

He shakes his head, short and sharp. Anyways.

"I dunno," he answers instead, vaguely. P is still the only name that comes to mind. Mr. Not a name. Merlin. Not his name. James? James. Maybe. "D'you remember what you're called?"