Scene #6845: OFF - Secret Zone - I Had Three Friends

Owner	Pose
Priscilla	The way into the sole remaining Zone opened by the final keycard, or likely the act itself of gathering each of them, is the same as the last. Yet, trekking across the invisible blasted plain of the Nothingness, watching the four point of light you're used to vanish into the paradoxical distance, and approaching the very last shining star ahead, tinged with red, you can't help but feel that somehow the constant current of whispering voices endemic to the space outside of space is growing louder as you approach, their attempts at constantly quieting each other less and less successful. You can, at the very last second, begin to make out fragments of whole sentences. '-left behind.' '-you killed them.' '-very important-' '-all over again-' 'Go to your room-' You make contact with the last star fixed in the void, buoyed upwards on a tide of conspiratorial 'Shhh!', and you're taken to- Chapter 5 The Bedroom Disorientingly, you're dropped into a small room with possibly the last red cube in existence, on a perfectly square island surrounded by a deep pool of splashing white plastic. Given the low ceiling over your heads and lack of any lighting, it should be pitch dark, but the plastic itself seems almost to glow. Even then, though, for once, the world lacks its garishly bright colours. The floor is black. The walls are black. The ceiling is black. The hallway ahead is black. The right angles that join them together are a deep grey, catching the light in such a strange way as to make them look drawn. None of them have any texture in particular. They don't even really feel like metal. Exiting, you take a long, narrow, perfectly straight and bare corridor. It's cold, and smells of stale dust and a whiff of smoke, like an air fan burnt out a while ago and the circulation had stopped, though there are no such things to be found walking a grey path through the dark. Taking the only route brings you upon the Batter already halfway there, his white visage standing out starkly in all the black. As you approach, your inner ear starts to gradually twist itself in knots, as your perspective of your own positions in space slowly revolves around where you actually are, until you feel like you're looking upon yourselves from above, and you exit into . . . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2-YImNtwGo Another small room. Bigger, this time, but not large. It's more like several rooms loosely squished together, without dividing doors, in a cramped, semi-organized arrangement. A wide space to the right feels, somehow, some way, vaguely like some sort of communal something or other, but it's completely blank, the walls and floor sheer and black as always. The left leads to a dead end that's stacked wall to wall with folding chairs, though they're placed one atop the other as if they were in a school storage closet. A single enclosed space divides the two halves up, in which an empty doorway shines out a faint white light, as if it were the only spot an artist bothered to fill in, on a hastily drawn map of little importance. And this space . . . Is a bedroom. Small. Spartan. Still somehow impossibly vacant. A tiny bed with a floral patterned blanket is tucked into one corner, with a squat dresser at its foot, and an enormous teddy bear as big as the furniture propped up against it, all in the same charcoal pencil on black palette. A piece of paper is stuck to the wall above the bed, actually white, and alongside it, on a huge stretch of blank wall with no windows, some sort of poster, with tiny text written in grey. Somehow, the emptiness of the room feels far more vast than it actually is. You could cross it end to end in half a dozen footsteps, but you somehow feel small inside of it.
Tina Natsumi	The phone is recording. The hat is on. Tina has a revolver in her pocket, more guns waiting in Uncle Sam, and the voices are continuing to be cryptic and semi-nonsensical when they go from guilt-tripping chides to stern parent. She's long since stopped trying to make sense of everything before her, instead settling for getting some good recording footage and just seeing things through to the end. The sight of the liquid plastic is somewhat nostalgic for her, and part of her is almost dumb enough to dunk her hand in just to see if it feels how it looks. Almost. Now that the group is coming towards what feels like the end of this journey, though, she's going to be smart about this. She's going to try and really focus and understand things instead of just being pulled along for the ride! ... At least, that's what she's thinking, but it's hard to know where to start this late in being involved. Spotting the familiar back of the Batter, Tina winces slightly as she feels that odd feeling in her head while heading into that... Closet? Bedroom? That's almost too normal for this place. Spying the giant teddy bear, Tina beelines for that first, but then she spots that poster with the suspicious text and starts heading that way to read what's on the thing. And try to take a few pictures of it, of course.
Janine Liberi	Janine is here. The stark monochromatic colors makes her eyes hurt so she keeps her eyes fixed on the ground for the most part. Walking along the corridor, her steps start to sway as the disorientation hits, and she finds herself looking down at herself. It reminds her of her first time in the hospital, so high on morphine she felt as if she was floating away. But this is no morphine, nor is it even sugar. It's like the worst trip one could ever have. "Batter," she says upon catching up with the man himself, her own voice sounding miles away. With him, they reach the other end of the hall, and step out into... some kind of flat maybe? The stacked chairs reminds Janine of primary school, and an old game occurs to her. "Hey, check it!" she calls out, before taking a running jump, twisting in mid-air and landing on the topmost chair in one of the piles in a sitting position. "Mastered this shit when I was seven." Then she hops down and looks sour once more. Back to the dreary misery. She steps through the door into the cramped bedroom. Looking from the big teddy to the paper to the poster. "This is a kid's room," she decides, before checking underneath the bed. Kids always hide things under those.
August Kohler	The voices barely bother August. He grimaces as they say 'you killed them', but continues onwards. The disorientation is what bothers him. The small room, the narrow corridor, and then the change of perspective as soon as they reach the Batter. Once they're done, and in another room, August rubs his eyes, grabbing something for balance, and then looks around. Completely blank wall. A bedroom. August's first action, after Tina goes for the writing, and Janine goes to check under the bed, is to move to open the dresser. Try and find out who this belongs to, if they keep a diary, anything. "Showoff." He responds to Janine, as he opens the drawers, one by one if there's multiple.
Doctor Strange	Stephen Strange is not unfamiliar with shifts in spatial position. To him, the wall is as good as the flooor, is as good as the ceiling. He pushes past the disorienting sensation. That sensation, to him, is old hat by now. Trying to make sense of it is pointless--it could mean anything, and the only certainty is that it means something. The Sorcerer Supreme has made much of the journey to this point floating an inch or two off of the ground. Even as he enters the bedroom, the Cloak of Levitation slowly, silently billows behind him absent any breeze. His attention is drawn not to the poster or the teddy bear, but the piece of paper on the wall. Strange examines it. Does it have any writing on it? A drawing? A hint as to some way to progress, as with the inputs for the controller some time back?
Yuuki Kuran	For once, for blessedly once, the color scale isn't 'please... stop...' for Yuuki. What had been so ocularly oppressive for months of this extended night of daydreaming, at its height in the shockingly bright and white 'purified' zone, was now let off. A pool of glowing plastic and pleasant darkness was such a welcome change of pace that Yuuki didn't question the shift, merely taking a moment to rub her eyes and sigh pleasedly. Once the chroma shift is thoroughly appreciated, though, Yuuki takes a moment to sniff the plastic-thick air. "No... George?" She wonders aloud as she follows the group into the too-small yet too-large Bedroom, clasping her hands behind her back as she squints at the poster on the wall. "Well, that means this can't be so bad. I'm almost dreading the ending of this. Almost."
Zero Kiryu	Whispers in the dark. As the rest press on into the star that represents their next destination, Zero Kiryu pauses. Up to this point he has more-or-less ignored the whispering in Nothingness, a creepy atmospheric footnote to the transition from A to B when an actual physical medium of transportation was not evident. He sends a vine on through ahead of him, detaching it from his body with a flick of his wrist and coming to a halt in the darkness just shy of the destination. He casts his consciousness towards the surrounding emptiness, searching for the presence of the voices. Even if something tangible results in short order, he follows on through, mind drifting towards the state of the Batter at the end of their last encounter. In the absence of the Puppeteer, it had still moved. Still sprung to life, and acted. Does the Queen have a Puppeteer? Is she also empty, slow to move without deliberate direction? He frowns, ill at ease with the possibilities behind those questions. With a jolt of agitation that he isn't altogether comfortable with, Zero realizes that his feelings aren't that different from those that Yuuki just voiced. He hesitates coming alongside her. After a small while, the hunter lifts his hand and settles it on Yuuki's shoulder. Supportive, but also seeking support.
Priscilla	Perversely, the sense of the Nothingness before Zero enters is not that the voices rise from below, but that they come from above, moving past like windblown clouds high, high up, talking over his head. There are no people to speak of. The Batter watches Janine leap to the top of the chairs, seemingly apathetically. The words she says as she moves on, right as she enters the bedroom, are strange. "You'll hurt yourself if you climb on things like that". Opening the drawers, August finds only a selection of identical black and white (well, grey and black) striped pajamas, fit for a small child, and a stack of equally black papers, with a number of pencil crayons worn down to the nubs, outside of grey, and red, though the red is only obvious by the fact it says rouge on the side. Scouring under the bed, Janine finds a single piece of wrapped hard candy. Strange examines the little piece of paper. It's a calendar post-it, for Sunday, February 11th, 2007. It's been extremely overembellished by the use of various pencil crayons, garishly and amateurishly decorated. It's also exactly the same post-it from the little calendar quiz to enter Alma, in Zone 1, way back when. It's not just identical. It is the same. It might even be more genuine. Tina and Yuuki gather around the poster. Inside of a great big floral border, on a field of grey, tiny letters are printed in black, slightly off kilter and repetitive, as if done by ink stamp. "I don't like this place very much. It's a good thing that Papa is here." "Today we played together. He gave me a comic." "He told me that I was ill, so I take pills." The Batter comes to the poster that the others are gathered at, guided by their interest, and then stares at it for several moments, before he too finally recites it out loud, though with an uncharacteristic bare hint of hesitation. In lieu of anything else to ostensibly do, the first person to check back outside the bedroom for anything wanders out onto a new scene. As if done by ghosts behind their backs, all of the chairs are gone. Rather, the chairs have been removed from their storage, and laid out into a wide circle in the vacant communal area. With the surreal semi-above perspective inherent to the room, you can tell that the chairs within have been carefully arranged into the shape of a smiley face. The Batter remains by the poster a moment longer. Just afterward, he recites aloud: "I don't like the pills." That's just what the poster says now. The dresser has a lampshade now too. There's a window high up the wall where there wasn't one before, though it only looks out into soft, formless white light.
August Kohler	August looks over the black papers and the pajams, sifting through them briefly to see if there's anything hidden, before deciding this is pointless and moving back. He moves outside, bored, and finds the chairs have been rearranged. That's creepy. So is the Batter's speaking up. "I don't like this place." He immediately recites. When he comes back in and there's now a window and a lampshade, he considers what to do next, frowning at the weirdness, and moves towards the window, climbing onto the bed if he has to in order to obtain necessary height. He's going to open it up and see if there's anything out there, or if it's just painted on the wall, or what.
Doctor Strange	Strange furrows his brow at the drawing. It isn't familiar. Though he does have a photographic memory, he wasn't present for Zone 1, and therefore the significance is lost upon him. He turns away, as people begin to gather around the poster. When the Batter reads it aloud, Strange's characteristic frown tightens at the corners. The person or being in this room isn't merely a child--they can't be. Perhaps this is Hugo's room, whoever that is. Regardless, as with much of this world, outward appearances are only a means of conveying, or perhaps hiding, more complex ideas. The image of a sickly child with a fatherly caretaker is more likely a metaphor. "The child is the world," mutters Strange. He steps out into the new scenery. The chairs are in a circle. He can tell that they've been moved into a smiley face, owing to the perspective. The sorcerer floats into the circle and rearranges the face into a word. "HI"
Janine Liberi	Janine shoots Batter a long, confused look as he actually kind of just... says something unrelated to the mission? And it's an almost fatherly warning? She scowls for a moment, but then pauses, takes a breath, and answers properly. "Right, yeah. Would be a real shitty way to go after all this, slipping and breaking my ankle or something. Sorry." Inside the room, she finds candy! "Score!" she shouts, pulling it out and holding it up. She doesn't eat it immediately though, pocketing it instead and listening as the Batter recites the words on the poster. "Man, that's a mood," she says. "I hate my pills too." She steps out, and now all the chairs are laid out in... a smiley face? "What the fuck? Are we not alone? Or is this one of those things where stuff will change when we're not looking?" To test this, she goes back into the bedroom, and indeed things are different. "All right, that's how we're gonna be huh?" she asks. She then re-examines everything in the room. Under the bed, behind the teddy, in the drawers. She also tries flicking the lamp off and on a few times.
Tina Natsumi	Janine's antics with the chair have Tina snickering and taking a brief video. Why not? It's not often she gets to see the dour girl goofing off, and it'll be plenty embarassing to send to her and August later. "No George, looks like. Or Bites." She chimes in after Yuuki, sounding somewhat relieved as she says that. She's seen enough of those two fighting to not want to see that in a kid's bedroom today. Turning back to the poster while Strange deals with the smaller piece of paper, she squints a bit at those words and turns back to the rest of the group. "Sick kid's room, looks like. Maybe we'll find 'em." She doesn't elaborate on whether she means the child or the pills as she steps back out of the room, almost expecting to just be in someone's house now rather than the uncomfortably blank hallway they had come into it from. Those chairs weren't there before. "Uh. Guys? Chairs moved while we weren't lookin'. It's a smiley face." She announces to the rest of the group, glancing back inside the bedroom jsut to make sure /that/ didn't turn into a bathroom in the meantime. That coincides with the Batter reading out the new line, drawing an awkward inhale through Tina's teeth. "... Oh great. We're dealin' with REGULAR ghosts now." Turning to the chairs again, Tina takes a seat on the one right in the middle of the mouth while inching it slowly towards the eye-positioned chairs. Might as well see if that causes something weird to happen.
Yuuki Kuran	Those sure are... WORDS. Puzzling words! Words that are... Yuuki has no idea. She's critically bad at puzzles. Instead, Zero looks to her for support, and she smiles softly back at him. "It's fine, Zero. We're here, now. Nightmare or pleasant fantasy, we'll wake up afterwards. So making the most of it is important, too, because we're here now." "And thankfully, so is Stephen Strange and Janine, both of whom are much better at puzzles than I am!" Yuuki notes with good cheer as Stephen goes about arranging furniture with MAGIC and declaring truths about the state of the world. "Biteblade did say something about the 'world' still having fight left in it... Zero, is the Batter alright? He seems..." She squints at the white-shirted baseball man. "Off." Not following for a room, Yuuki crouches down into a deep knee bend, placing a hand on the floor and expanding her own senses 'outward'. Feeling about for another mind or intelligence, as Stephen indicated the whole area may be. "Do you think... this is where the Puppeteer is?"
Zero Kiryu	"Nobody likes their pills. Even if they fix something, it means it was wrong to begin with." Zero remarks, towards the others. He doesn't think too much about the particular direction of the voices. The lack of a mind behind them, well... that's also just about as-expected. Yuuki smiles at him, and offers reassurance. Having nothing else to say to that, he simply smiles back. Nothing else is presently required. His attention turns towards the Batter, a direct response to Yuuki's concern. He doesn't need to read the Batter's mind to know that it probably isn't really alright. "The Puppeteer abandoned the Batter during the last battle. I doubt he's in a good way. But I don't think he ever was in a good way, either. I think he's probably broken like nearly everything else here." The word 'he' rankles Zero, a little. The Batter doesn't really strike him as a he anymore. More like an ambiguous it. But then again, it certainly had some minimal will to summon up and take action on its own. It was like ungreased gears turning furiously against one another, but it was certainly something. Not utter emptiness. His hand slips from Yuuki's shoulder as she crouches. While she does that and searches for the Puppeteer, Zero turns his mind's eye towards the Batter, scanning his current thoughts and feelings.
Priscilla	August can simply stand on the headboard of the bed to look out the window. The cheap plastic creaks slightly under his weight. The window is just a square hole, fit to be cut into the side of a bunker, as every other window is here, though he finds himself simply squinting into whiteness; not quite the harsh, sterile whiteness of a Purified Zone, but . . . it strikes him, somehow, as 'unformed'. That's the best keyword that comes to mind. The Batter no longer has anything to say on the future subjects Janine has to opine on. He has run out of dialogue at this juncture. When she leaves the main room and heads back in again, the instant Tina blinks while scooching along in her chair, everyone finds that the chair are rearranged in a frowny face now instead. "I don't like the pills." the poster says. She returns to flick the lamp on and off, and finds August staring at the window, stood on top of a plastic stool that now also exists in the room, and not the headboard he climbed on top of. A picture frame sits on the dresser, with an empty glass pane in it. Pencil crayons sit on the floor, scattered around sheets of paper with no drawings. The sense of the room 'filling in' with each turn around is unignorable, especially to those looking for it. The lamp only casts vague light that illuminates an island of charcoal grey, but Yuuki feels very much like these details are being 'remembered' rather than added, like bits of a dream that suddenly come back when one tries their hardest to recall it after waking up, having almost forgotten. It's not totally unlike a Guardian's work, but it's almost comatose. That, and vastly, overwhelmingly more powerful, if these details pop up silently and effortlessly, fully formed in instants, even just subconsciously. There is also the distinct impression that she isn't the only one 'looking down upon herself'. In and out, poking at this and that. Little to the cramped quarters seems to have rhyme or reason, or much of a sense of time. Doctor Strange carefully rearranges the chairs into a 'Hi', in an attempt to communicate with whatever he thinks is here. Nothing happens. Patrolling around the room accomplishes nothing. Heading back into the Bedroom one more time now encounters a door where there was none before, at the back end of the room, leading out into the same white light August had spied through the window. The poster now simply says "The door is open -->" with an arrow drawn pointing to it. The chairs outside, and their 'Hi', are simply stacked back up again. Heading through the door doesn't take you into anything brightly glowing, but another hall, cramped and winding, square and dark, stale and . . . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ua94l7sawg . . . poorly drawn. The way forward has been scribbled in shades of grey pencil crayon on a field of black, not so much hastily as simply with very little coordination, with plenty of squiggly gaps in what should be the solid grey colour of the floor. Crude windows are penciled on the walls, not glowing white, but simply coloured with it, with simple cross beams through them as if they were proper glass windows, and not just holes in the walls. You can hear scratching and scraping in the distance, entirely too much like graphite rubbing over paper, but echoing all around you. Spectres wander the halls, between you and the end. Even they, however, are poorly rendered, and 'animated' by redrawing the same cartoony blob ghost over and over again. Thick black outlines, stubby little arms, gaping eyes and mouths of various inconsistent sizes, and jarringly sketchy and uneven flying raise the question of whether they're really ghosts at all, or simply a representation of them, until they turn on you.
Priscilla	Zero feels out the strange, enigmatic turning of cosmic gears once again where his awareness extends to the Batter, lining up and striking the first crudely drawn ghost into a fanciful explosion of squiggled white lines. A few moments later though, he feels the gears stutter, pause, and then that second presence seize hold of them again. This time the sense of reluctance mixed with fascination is vastly clearer than he'd felt anything secondhand before. He can tell straight away, the feeling of having been 'hovering around' the Batter, conflicted. It's not entirely dissimilar to how he once orbited Yuuki, a long time ago. If before he had picked up these feelings 'through the strings' however, this time it feels as if someone is 'in the same room' with him; someone is sitting adjacent to him in the theatre, whispering to their friend about the screenplay too quietly for him to hear. The Batter used Wide Angle! Abstract Spectre x15 Imprecise ectoplasmic incarnation. Strong weakness to smoke and plastic. It's just as he said. As George warned as well. No hand of a creator drew in mock ghosts. The Spectres have seeped their way even into this inner sanctum; though mutated and changed in paradigm by the strange fabric at work, they're deadlier than ever. The pencil sketched ghosts set upon you in instants, vomiting forth spiraling mad scribbles of white --the pencil colour that didn't exist-- that twist and thrust and pierce through you, burning like fire, searing the retinas with crashing avalanches of nonsensical images that make the head feel like it's about to burst, blind, stricken, in agony, barely able to tell where you are, each strike worse than the last.
August Kohler	On top of the headboard, August looks out the window. Unformed. A bit later, he moves to get down, and finds that he's not on the headboard, but a stool. This clearly unnerves him, though not enough to cause him to lose his balance, as he takes a step out. "Yeah, I think I /really/ don't like this place." August continues, as they go out and in and find that there's now a door. Well, that's better than playing around with things until they find an answer. Stepping through the door, the scribbled environment gets a 'huh' from August, until he spots the Spectres. With a flash of his mirrored bracelet to his eyes, Dietrich is summoned with a call-out, and the black knight manifests, climbed upon, and sword lifted up. Weakness to smoke. A whole bunch of them. "Alright, guys. Let's get to work." Dietrich surges forward, blade suddenly catching ablaze as it starts burning hot enough to smoke, and then sweeps into a few spectres, trying to carve through them. For August, this certainly beats abstract puzzle solving.
Doctor Strange	"Maybe the Puppeteer, maybe Hugo," says Strange to Yuuki. "Maybe someone else. Whoever it is, they can see us." He points up, keenly aware of being able to see himself pointing. Despite his observation, nothing seems to happen when he makes his message. With nowhere else to go, he heads back into the Bedroom. The door is open. He steps through it. Being without children, and unused to their presence, the scratching doesn't at first seem like that of a pencil until he's in the hallway, able to see its poorly drawn confines and the floating spectres. At that point, and despite the lack of response to his message, Strange's suspicion that they're being watched by the 'child' only grows stronger. The dingy gray of the hallway is soon host to brilliant orange. When the spectres turn on the party, Strange readies his mandalas with a sonorous chime. The blinding white of the spectres' sensory overload sears his vision. The sorcerer touches upon the ground, reeling from the pain. His back hits the wall. Muscle memory allows him a counterattack. After his fingers form the necessary movements, the rings of glyphs lock into place. They pull matter from nearby, cosmically speaking. Liquid plastic streams from the interdimensional portals before his hands, frozen into sharp lances. Each is hurled with desperate force in an effort to silence the screeching of the spectres' attacks against the walls of his mind.
Janine Liberi	Strange comes in, and suddenly there is a door. So it doesn't even require 'not looking.' "Whoever is doing this has some serious flex around here. Is it the Queen?" Janine ponders aloud. "Mmm. Probably not. Things would be a lot more hostile if it were her." She strides through the door, and speak of the devil, spectres. "God damn it," she bemoans as she draws her sabre. The scribbly ghosts scream white noise at the Italian, which she attempts to deflect with her sword, but trying to fight from this top-down perspective is tricky, and the swing goes wide. She screams, taking a knee as the sensory overload hits her. But there's something helpful in all this. From here, the pain seems far away, allowing her to rally. "God damn GHOSTS! PERSONA!" Janine yells, bringing forth Catherine. Her shackled hands twist, gilded thread dancing between them as a splays out to fill the hallway, lashing from wall to wall, roof to floor. "Now die!" she yells, and the Persona yanks her arms back. The threads collapse, coming together to enwrap the spectres. They're thin and sharp, and collapse with such force as to hopefully slice them into pieces. Either way, Janine is on the move, running at an absurd speed. She's sick of dealing with spectres, so she's trying to get past them.
Tina Natsumi	At first, Tina doesn't even notice that the chairs on the sides have rearranged themselves. She's in the middle seat, after all, and she's moving forward! When nothing seems to happen, though, she turns while getting ready to rise and notices that the chairs on her sides are all off position. "... Yep. We got some kinda regular ghosts here." Getting up to watch Strange work his magic on the chairs, Tina glance saround rapidly to see if anything further happens with that greeting spelled out. When it doesn't look like anythingf's happening, she heads back into the bedroom, then right back out to take a look at the chairs again. Now they're stacked. If not for the newly appeared door, Tina would mess with them more, but... Well. DOOR. Making a beeline for that now, she moves forward quickly as she calls upon Uncle Sam to act the role of WAIST HIGH COVER, the robot skidding slightly as it slides into a crouch and holds its chunky star-spangled arms forward to act as an impromptu shield agaist those incoming scribbles and white line attacks. "Cover ready! Ach... Stingin' little buggers, so take 'em out quick!" Tina holds back from complaining about the headaches starting to pound away at the back of her skull as she starts shooting the Spectres with her revolver, unloading six rapid shots before taking considerably longer to reload for the next volley.
Zero Kiryu	Let the Batter do it himself. It is the first time that Zero Kiryu has wielded a true psychic command. Soporifics and disabling agents, yes, but never outright mental dominance. He doubts that it'll work, notwithstanding that he's not completely certain that is a talent he has at all. More than that, the Puppeteer seems unlikely to be affected by such a brazen, direct demand. As absorbed as he is into examing the Batter and attempting to excise the Puppeteer's influence, Zero simply doesn't notice the Spectres revving up and taking a run at his mind in the more immediate and physical sense. Which is why he withdraws his mental presence with a sudden hiss of pain, a bombardment of psychic trauma tearing him up and leaving him reeling. One eye is squeezed shut, and one hand rises to grasp at his temple. The pain in his head is like somebody set every connection running from his eye to his brain on fire and then started jabbing an icepick into his sinuses. "Fffffuck." He growls towards nobody in particular, in the tone that most people do when they just SLAM their foot directly into something unexpectedly. It is a universal experience. Hunched over and just trying to cope with this, he hisses at Yuuki, "The Puppeteer is here, see if you can get a better fix on it."
Yuuki Kuran	This is a lot to process. Yuuki, slow as she is with puzzles, tries to grasp at straws as reality blinks and shifts. The whole place strains, like a memory, stretching over the half-remembered instances. The light is like so, the bed creaks like so, the window is there, the lamp casts the dim halo of weak light... "Maybe the spectres are... Bits of radiation? Of sickness? No, that doesn't make sense..." She opines, trying to make her own breakthrough with little to go on. The details of previous adventures are like dreamstuff in HER own head, and so it's hard to summon up a straight line out of them. "Why would the Zones have Guardians that control them? Bitter pills... Nnf, I'm so terribly bad at puzzles. Let me just--" Cut off by her observing eyes getting seared out by a painful, retina-bubbling Spectre attack, causing her to drop on the ground and roll back and forth comically, hands pressed into her eyes. "Aghhhh! Right in the-- This place was so nice and dark! Now it's bright, too bright!!!" So blinded, Yuuki really doesn't have any recourse but to reach out with Other Senses, searching again for the Puppeteer now - tracing from the Batter 'outwards'.
Priscilla	A disproportionate amount of blood must be shed just to move up a few bends in the hallway. Where it is, even your own blood, not just that of the Spectres, turns to rough red scribbles of coarse pencil crayon on the ground where it splatters, leaving poorly rendered two-dimensional images instead of stains. Additional Spectres seem to simply come from the walls, appearing in the arcs where no one is looking and closing in on the fray like sharks with the scent of blood. Where they're blown to hastily scrawled bits, two more seem to take their place, making the battle worse and worse as it progresses through the corridor. They're attracted to this place, as much as they are to the living. Fighting to the exit, you finally see one more door around the sixth or seventh blind corner, glowing softly with the infinite, unbound, unformed light beyond it. The maelstrom of carnage surrounding the Batter, moving at the center of the formation, surrounded by his halos as essentially a party of four unto himself, doesn't so much as hitch when Zero issues his order, though for whatever reason, the Batter himself replies to Zero, who hadn't said anything audible, "We're not done yet. There's still more you need to do." However, Yuuki reaching out again, past the pain, feels herself looking down upon herself, and 'sees' the toughts around her transcribed into the words: Let the Batter do it himself Yes »No Reaching the door, the light spreads out and envelops you completely. Briefly, you're engulfed in a floating nothing the exact opposite of the Nothingness --bright, silent, calm, firm, warm. For a few seconds, you can hear a sound so normal that it is the most sharply dissonant note imaginable at this time: the sound of grass and dirt crunching underneath your feet. A breath of fresh air, tinged with smoke. Warmth on your skin. The thought unbidden . . . 'Papa said that we'll go play outside tomorrow' Chapter 4 I had three friends. Darkness again. The void. The sensation of a wall just ahead of you, if only for what is pinned up on it. A sheet of black paper, lined in grey, originally grid paper but coopted for a child's crude drawing. A classical square and triangle 'house' is drawn at the bottom, outlined in white, with a great big red circle drawn over it, and some sort of incredibly imprecise squiggle of a figure in front of it. A field of scratchy red grass (having only two colours to work with) pans out into a field ahead. Up and to the left, a very, very tall house with another red circle, occupied by a stick figure that exaggeratedly takes up a vertical third of the page. Directly ahead, the grass stops, and a flock of scribbled 'V's that can only be birds take flight from another red circle. The last red circle is up and to the right, where a huge white blob with a head and arms emerges from the ground. The sun occupies the corner of the page, as it always does with fridge drawings, letting off spidery red rays. Glancing at it, a pencil crayon is jabbed into the 'home' circle, with the words 'my room' scrawled next to it. More pencils are scattered loose across the nothing-floor, all identical shades of grey.
Janine Liberi	Janine sprints through the corridor, bursts into the void of light, and is confronted by... a picture? A child's drawing of three things in what looks like a field of red grass. A house, a taller house and... what the hell, a meteor impact? She squints her 'eyes' in that she tries to look closer from this warped perspective. No, not an impact. It has a circle on top, like a head. It's like... a big person. A big, fat... person. "Oh no. Oh nonononono," she says, trying to reach out a 'hand' towards it, towards the big white circle and the red splotch before it.
Tina Natsumi	So much for acting as cover. When it becomes more apparent that fighting in one spot isn't going to do, Tina adjusts her strategy accordingly. Uncle Sam gets back up, brings out a pair of shotguns, and starts marching forward, alternating shots to help disperse the spectres harassing the group and slowing down their exit. Despite the Persona's movements, though, Tina feels something nagging in the back of her head. Something about letting the Batter handle himself here. Indeed, it certainly looks like he's doing rather well clearing out those ghosts, but can she just let him handle it? Can any of them? If nothing else, she'll still see this through to the end. Breathing a sigh of relief as they reach the outside of the distorted ghost house, Tina tips her head back briefly while readjusting the phone in her pocket. "Feels like it should be bright 'n' sunny out here, but... Nope. Just some weird voices and... Uh." She reaches a hand out to touch the paper. To make sure it's really paper. She glances over at Janine, shrugging lightly and peering at the splotched circle for a moment before running a finger over the white line. "Lay it on us, Janine. Whatcha oh nono-in about?"
Janine Liberi	"Think, you subculture ho," Janine says in a fairly snappy tone of voice. Whatever it is has her anxious. "Who have we seen that is this rotund?" she asks, tracing a finger all around the big white blob. "This is the endgame, right? What accompanies that? A fucking boss rush."
August Kohler	Fighting through the spectres, August is burnt and injured, but still moving. He coughs from where the whiteness had hit him in the face, regenerating through the acid burns. Once they get to the door, August pushes through, and the light spreads, and they're...in nothing. And then, it feels like they're outside. It feels natural. This is strange. Then a clip back to darkness, and August tries to see, but can only feel a wall. "What the fuck?" As he see the picture, he glances at it, and as Janine goes 'oh no', August asks the only thing he can. The only thing that he can make sense of in this place. "Is that everyone we've thought? Why are they all drawn here?? Wait, are you telling me they'll /come back/?" "/Fuck that!" August cries out. "We killed them! They better goddamn stay dead."
Yuuki Kuran	Being blinded, Yuuki cannot see. Thankfully, Yuuki can see in God Game perspective by riding the pain off of the Batter up to the Puppeteer's 'perspective', and in doing so, harness her great Anime Speed to skip the part where she's being stabbed to ocular death to the realm of nothingness. The next room. Another Drawing. "But didn't we learn the guardians changed? Or is this... Nnnf. No. At least Japhelt and Dedan are dead." Yuuki seems Very Certain. "They're definitely gone."
Zero Kiryu	The Batter answers for the Puppeteer. Of course it does. Zero staggers to one side, still reeling from the mental damage. The thing that seems to bring him together the most is Yuuki rolling around on the ground. He shakes his head furiously, eliciting a painful throb as -- Yuuki abuses the third person camera to actually just go right ahead and do what she needs to do. He follows after, at a much slower clip. But without the need to focus on Yuuki, his attention turns towards the Batter. He's tempted to get growly and aggravated, but in the end he decides that a question is more useful. Ignoring the bizarreness of the surroundings and simply cleaving close to Yuuki, he asks, "You said that you had been away too long-- why? What were you doing? Why did you come back so empty?"
Doctor Strange	The only word to suitably describe the experience of the hallway and struggling through it is 'gauntlet.' When at last he reaches the bright and silent calm on the other side of the door, Doctor Strange appears somewhat worse for wear. A cold sheen of sweat clings to him, his salt and pepper hair damp with that same exertion. Strange heaves a sigh, not of relief, but of simple fatigue--catching his breath. Having closed his eyes to take a breather, he opens them at once, upon hearing the sound of grass. Discordant though it might be, it is something as-yet undiscovered in this world. He scarcely has time to ponder it, much less the musings of the mysterious child, before he's plunged into darkness with everyone else. He approaches the wall once he's able, no doubt along with everyone else. Everyone can see that he has thoughts, too, but after the grueling hallway and the abrupt change in locale, his first thoughts are of his allies. He takes a brief, silent inventory, making sure that no one was left behind. Once he's satisfied, he turns his attention fully to the drawing. "Things like Guardians don't often die in the way mortals do," says Strange to August following the latter's complaint. "If they die at all. It's possible that the Batter's purification brought them here," continues the sorcerer. "That this... area... is cosmologically significant." "We'll either see them again, or we'll see the artist. Or both. That drawing isn't there without reason."
Yuuki Kuran	"The artist, then." Yuuki says. "I was quite mad at both Japhelt and Dedan, and perhaps used more force than I should have for such a delicate place, but..." Yuuki shrugs at this most dire of 'yeah no they're definitely dead', her attitude still tempered by her eyes not working and her whole experience being text-box like. "Well, we didn't really know the depth of what we were messing with before." Yuuki full-body turns towards Strange. "... Perhaps you had an inkling. You're much better with puzzles."
Tina Natsumi	"... Oh, come on. You really think there's...?" Tina stops herself from finishing that sentence, already feeling the universe conspiring against her. She lets out a long sigh as August and Strange back up that possibility, waving Uncle Sam over to get back into position as cover for whatever may come. "I really hope you're wrong about this."
Priscilla	Standing in front of the drawing, bickering and theorizing, the scan definition that exists in the world around you slowly begins to blur and dissolve, and then you're straightaway dropped back into the room you came from. In a manner of speaking, at least. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQfmV2BeByQ The blank floor of the multi-part room is patterned over with soft grey this time. The suggestion of some kind of carpet or walkway exists, but it's the barest impression of one. Black metal crates, identical to the crates found anywhere else, are stacked up where the chairs were previously stored, and clustered in corners and on desks anyways. They actually smell of slightly rain-rusted steel, and clutter the small space awfully. Some have been broken open already, their lids discarded and their contents emptied. A long aluminium bench fills up the north side of the room where the chairs once were, with only a few remaining, set at the desk like a workstation, but with only blank spots in front of them. Numerous windows dot the wall, high up over the bench, gazing out into whiteness. The bedroom is the same as before, but now the calendar post-it says that it is June 3rd, garishly decorated by a bored and creative hand once again. It is the genuine article that sat alongside February 11th back then. In place of the poster, the inexplicable drawing has been pinned to the wall, put up where and like a poster actually would be --to display art, rather than cryptic text. That is except for Janine. She's gone. Gone somewhere. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuVxwb9ysM4 Janine finds herself wandering up towards the summit of a hill, past which there is only a cliff's edge. She won't remember ever walking there, but there are footprints in the thick . . . grass, behind her. Brown dirt scuffs under her feet. Dark, olive green grass, dry and partially withered, covers the hillside, looking almost brown against the fiery orange rays of sunset, filtered through the thick haze of sulfurous clouds in the distance. A handful of trees demarcate the cliff edge, tilting over the sheer drop, roots partially exposed. Their bark is like ash, and their gnarled branches completely bare of leaves. Looking back, Janine can see an enormous, rolling field behind her, covered in neck tall weeds, and standing there, she can feel an intense, sweaty, vaguely unwholesome sort of heat that probably accounts for the poor state of the vegetation. Halfway up the hill, an enormous hole has been driven into the ground, in which a man is stuck. A man in a white collared shirt and black tie, impossibly, gigantically enormous, with a sweaty bald head and flushed rosy cheeks, stares down at her even when he's stuck up to his shoulders in the gap. He's no less preposterously huge than Janine remembers him, but that gaze of his feels considerably less . . . unwholesome. When she arrives, he twists his tubby neck to look at her with a visible wave of relief. "Eh! You, down there, come closer!" he shouts. "Hehe, hey, little one, I'm stuck . . . can you help me get out of here?" He only needs to glance down at her once, though, paling in comparison to his gargantuan physique. ". . . I suppose not. If you go look for someone to help me, I'll make you some cake! It will be delicious, you'll see. And we'll tell each other jokes. Go find help, I beg you."
August Kohler	Strange gets a sigh in reply. "Yeah, but I don't like it." And then, the room shifts again, and August immediately starts looking at what's different. February 111th has become June 3rd. "We've advanced a few months, it seems?" He glances around the room, nods, and is about to go look when he realizes something. "Where the fuck is Janine?" Immediately, actually, tangibly worried, August's eyes widen, as he heads all around the area, looking for her. When he doesn't find her, he goes up to the drawing. "She was touching it. Did it...?" August reaches a hand out, moving to touch it, tracing around the fat white blob. He's not sure whether it'll do anything, now that they've changed rooms, but if he can reach Janine, he wants to.
Tina Natsumi	Tina jerks sideways as their surroundings change again, the strange gym storage/bedroom looking as though it's starting to become more metallic than before. The smell hits her before Janine's disappearance does, and she wrinkles her nose while glancing around once again. "Is this showin' us how this... These zones started getting all screwy and weird?" She asks after August mentions the change in months, causing Tina to check for herself just to confirm that. When he mentions Janine's disappearance, though, the faux cowgirl draws her revolver once more. "I didn't disappear, though. Unless..." Tina looks for that drawing again. Spotting it on the wall where the poster had been, she starts hover-handing the red splotch to see if that does anything on its own. If it doesn't after the first five seconds, she outright stabs her fingers against it and braces herself for... Something. Probably a bad something, but something.
Doctor Strange	The Sorcerer Supreme seems to be taking the sudden changes in scenery fairly well. It must be an occupational hazard in his line of work. "It must have," says Strange in response to August. "The calendar changed. Like you said." Each of these figures represents a Guardian. Japhet and Enoch he knows of, but there is one for which his knowledge is lacking. Rather than join Janine, Strange steps forward and places a hand upon the red dot closest to the towering figure before the equally tall house. Just as he does so, another Strange appears in a flash of green light. Future!Strange wordlessly touches his scarred, trembling finger to the red circle beneath the flock of birds.
Janine Liberi	Suddenly, Janine is on a cliff, walking up to the peak of it. And there, at the top, is a familiar fat face. "Enoch!" she snarls, hand drifting towards her sabre hilt. But then he addresses her politely, asking for help. She walks up to the crest of the hill and sees that he's stuck. Only now does she examine him properly. He's still grotesquely fat, but nowhere near as large as before. Still sweaty too, but his eyes don't send chills down her spine anymore. This is Enoch, but not as she knew him. But, what to do? Is this just a vision of something, or has she actually gone back in time? If it is just a vision, she can do as she pleases, it won't change anything. With Enoch stuck, she could take his head no problem, torture him... and if she is in the past, maybe this would stop him from turning people into sugar to feed his addiction and create users out of others. He's already talking about cake after all... But does she want to do that? Or is that just some cry of "justice" or something, that monkey brain demanding blood for blood. She doesn't know. She really doesn't know. So she just acts. "Nah, don't worry. I can get you out. Catherine." Her Persona arises behind her and weaves its hands, sending a loop of golden wire around the cliff between Janine and Enoch. The wire slices through the crumbling earth, sending Enoch and the ground he's stuck in falling over the edge. In that long, long moment, it seems like Janine is sending him to his death. But suddenly, more and more wires lash out to coil around the chunk of earthas a powerful gust of wind blows up the cliff-face. Janine herself begins sweating from exertion as Catherine brings the full brunt of her powers to the fore, combining strong winds with her wires to try and bring Enoch up and slam him against the hill, shattering his earthen prison and sending him tumbling to safety!
Yuuki Kuran	Easing back into her own perceptions is like slipping into a warm bath after being out in the cold winter air for too long. Which, specifically, is an experience of pins-and-needles that Yuuki has no real other context for: uniquely unpleasant as it is. Rubbing her eyes and muttering darkly at the whole experience, she first rapid-blinks her eyes, and-- As the room comes in and out o focus, Janine is gone. "How did you lose Janine, August?" She wonders, though he seems apt to go out and find her by touching strange dream-artifacts. For Yuuki's part, she heads for the boxes, their scent familiar and bringing to mind a rusting carnival she had gone to long ago. "Black boxes. Metal, too... Supplies?" Yuuki paws around for any expended packaging, like MRE containers or anything that'd give her a clue as to the contents. "I'm sure these aren't full of 'Belial Meat' and 'Joker Tags'."
Priscilla	Tina and August prodding the picture on the wall mostly result in crumpling up the paper until the icon of the red circle is chosen. At that point, they too disappear before everyone's eyes, and end up on the same hillside as Janine, just in time to see her cut Enoch loose. The preposterously huge man disappears over the now-shortened cliff edge with a profoundly alarmed "Wooooooaaaaaaaahhhoohohaoooooo!", before somehow, against all odds, his bulk is hauled back over the incline, and the solid rock around him smashes like sugar glass when he impacts the hillside and starts tumbling down, picking up tremendous speed rolling away to the west. Strange and Strange get with the same program. The both of them dissolve as well. Strange 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQv5gO06qfk The Sorcerer Supreme arrives at the edge of a cliff. Parched grass rustles quietly where he levitates over it, and bare, ashen trees anchor their gnarled roots deep into the dry, burnt sienna earth. The heat is still sweltering even with the sun setting to his left, causing the air to waver with the intense updraft coming from below, obscured by so much smoggy haze that he can't even tell what's down there. A wooden cottage sits squarely ahead of him, though only by the most charitable description; it looks as if it were stitched together out of every log someone could hack up, skinny or brittle as they might be, with a pair of windows salvaged from some other building set slightly unevenly into it, and a door that squeaks loudly with the faintest breeze. Inside is almost equally as bare, with the floor only sanded down to a rough flatness, lit up by the orange beams filtering through the windows. Someone also managed to salvage an old clock sitting high up on the wall, but it appears to be stuck at 9 o'clock. That person would probably be the excessively tall man standing next to it, wearing a long, double breasted army coat. He looks extremely thin; he's gaunt to the point of borderline starving, but it mostly makes his thick, corded muscles extremely sharply visible. He too is sweating in the heat, with a dark, teeth-gritting scowl on his face, but when Strange enters, he gasps out loud, "Finally, somebody, you would think there's nobody left on Earth anymore . . . Finally . . ." "Either way, I'm glad to see you, my boy." he says to Strange. He uses the sort of overly familiar tone one does with a stranger's child they're meeting for the first time. "I got bitten by a cow; the pain is difficult to bear. Also, it has been nine o'clock for a while now, and I don't like that at all. What are you doing here, by the way? This isn't really a place for you." Strange 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQDJLf-0yH0 The Sorcerer Supreme arrives at the edge of a cliff. This one faces the north. It is easily the highest point around, where looking back gives him a commanding view of fields of stubborn weeds, barren trees, deep holes and tall crags, winding all the way back to another hillside far to the south, and some sort of squat suggestion of a building. Past the edge of the cliff, it looks as if he might be on a mountaintop, high above the clouds, but those are clearly above him, and the sea of leaden orange fumes that stretches away as far as the eye can see is clearly something else. A flock of white birds takes off the second he arrives, leaving just one of them behind. The tiny little songbird sits on a branch at the very edge of the cliff, where the tree is inches from falling out of the crumbling wall and miles down into the abyss. The little bird tweets at him, yet he implicitly understands it somehow. "Hey, be careful, it is dangerous around here. Do not go near that cliff, you could fall and hurt yourself. You should take good care of yourself."
Priscilla	Yuuki, meanwhile goes rooting around in crates. They require her to pry them open without a screwdriver, and squeal plaintively as she does so. The insides seem to be top to bottom stacks of brown packages, with writing on them that looks fuzzy and disfigured, like felt marker soaked with water. Tearing them open, she finds parcels of wrapped and preserved meat, bottled water, thread and needles, bandages, matches, screws and nails, unreadable tiny plastic manuals, cartons of crayons and blank paper, helmets, and something that vaguely looks like a radio. The Batter replies to Zero, "We couldn't agree on it. I felt there might have been an alternative." he walks up and touches the drawing. "There wasn't. That's why I'm here." He then disappears.
August Kohler	As August transports, Dietrich comes with him. Right in time for Enoch to be rolling down a hill. And Janine's there! "Janine, are you alright? What the hell is going on?" Either way, it doesn't look like Janine attacked Enoch, or like he's attacking her. Before they presumably kill him (again), they should be able to slow him down. August leaps on Dietrich's back, and Dietrich speeds up. He's not as fast as Janine and Catherine, but the black knight moves to try and cut Enoch off as he rolls west, and then use his super strength to bring him to a halt without getting crushed in the process. It'll probably be exhausting and difficult to do so, but Dietrich is massively strong, so.
Doctor Strange	Present!Strange finds himself faced with a cabin overlooking a cliff. These visions, or interludes, whatever the correct word is, are usually pretty straightforward. He enters the cabin--there isn't much else to do. As he might have expected from the drawing, the cabin's owner, or occupant, is excessively tall. "I'm Doctor Strange," says the visitor. He lands, his wrapped cloth boots causing the floor to creak slightly. "I'm here to help," says the Sorcerer Supreme. "To try and help. There's a lot to be done." He tries to keep his speech more or less in the same simple, slightly guarded fashion so many of this world's inhabitants use. It conveys a general idea without letting on too much. "Would you like me to look at that bite? I might be able to make it better, and it might take your mind off the time." % Future!Strange There is a moment where the Sorcerer Supreme is lost in the spectacle. The flock of birds takes off, and for a moment, he can watch that flight spread out across the tiny infinity of a few seconds. His eye catches the building in the distance. This far away... yes, it very well could be the cabin. "I appreciate the concern," says Strange to the little bird, turning to face it with a grateful nod. "I'll take good care of myself, if you promise to take good care of yourself. Will /you/ be alright near that cliff?"
Janine Liberi	Janine turns to watch Enoch tumble, just in time to see August and Tina arrive. "Hey, it's not a boss rush!" she shouts, as Catherine creates a strong wind to push against Enoch, slowing his roll and supporting Dietrich in stopping the fat man from rolling away. "This is like... the past maybe? He's way nicer here. I was tempted to kill him, but he offered cake if I helped him out. And I can't say no to a guy offering cake." She says this with total sincerity. rOnce Enoch has stopped, Janine has Catherine use her wires to help lift him to his feet. "Okay big guy," she says to him. "I figure there's other people around here, right? At the very least, a talking bird and a tall, gaunt guy? Let's go see 'em."
Zero Kiryu	Zero hesitates. He turns his head to look towards Yuuki, and her pile of crates. He wants answers, and the Batter's been giving them. More and more as they've gotten closer to their objective. But there's certainly a part of him that doesn't exactly want to separate from Yuuki too long in this place. He comes up behind her, leaning over to touch her arm and deposit a twist of vine like a bracer around her wrist. "A familiar, please. One of the butterflies. Have it rest on my head or shoulder. I'm going to follow the Batter." Zero requests of Yuuki, quietly. He doesn't linger too terribly long. As soon as he receives some sort of affirmative or negative, Zero returns to the drawing and presses his hand to it, trying to emulate the Batter's 'direction'.
Tina Natsumi	Success! Tina lets out a little cheer as she goes from staring at a picture to staring at Janine throwing Enoch off a cliff, slamming Enoch into a cliff, and rolling Enoch down a hill. "Hah! Knew it. Maybe we can figure out what made this place all weird an' gross while we're here. Or..." Change the past? Tina seems hesitant to say what's on her mind after that, undoubtedly due to all sorts of media from her past barraging her all at once about the risks of time travel. After another long inhale to sort her thoguhts out, Tina chases off after August and Enoch as the goal of slowing him down becomes moderately apparent! Why, exactly, she's not sure. Considering that August isn't trying to actually cut him apart instead of grabbing him, though, it's not hard to figure out what's going on. Tina and Uncle Sam break into a rapid run, the former jumping onto the latter's back while letting her Persona handle both the legwork and the physical attempt to pull Enoch back before he rolls over everyone in the process. "Dang, pard. You're a lot faster than ya look." Chuckling lightly, she hangs back to let Janine handle the rest of the talking.
Yuuki Kuran	Touching the drawing teleports you off to another realm? That's... Worrying. But not bad. Worrying in the sense of 'how does one get back?' And in Yuuki's time of need, Zero gives an answer. He's following the Batter, as the others did, and so, with a gesture, a white butterfly peels off from her sleeve to rest on Zero's shoulder, while she explores the contents of the boxes, setting aside things like crayons and the like and nibbling quietly on a piece of dried jerkey. "I actually feel bad, opening up the supplies..." She says to... Well, herself, seeing as everyone else has used the drawing-portal. Unprying the container, she peers at the label for any words - or things - that are close to the items in their inventory. Tabs, meats, what-have-you. "Maybe the jerkey is the Belial Meat?"
Priscilla	It does indeed take a tremendous amount of effort to get the tumbling Enoch to even start slowing down. It sends August on a wild, serpentine ride through a thick maze of coarse brambles clawing at his ankles, and puts Tina through dense fields of scraggly weeds lashing at his face and hands. Even with the thick mud, the rolling travels up and down every slight incline and decline in the ground. When he eventually comes to a halt, he finally sits himself upright with a tremendous shake of the earth, and then with one mighty flex, breaks the last vestiges of cliff rock still clinging to him, coughing up a bit of ingested dirt right after. "Thank you very much little one! I made a promise, and I intend to keep it! Soon enough, you'll be climbing a mountain of delightful confectionaries!" Enoch laughs clapping down his starched white shirt. Which of the three he's talking to seems oddly nonspecific. "Oh? You've already spoken to them? Aha, I see! They must have told you to go look for me! Well then, meet me at the cottage, at the west side of the canyon!" he says, starting to trundle off in that direction with immense strides. "And make certain you aren't out for too long, little one. You wouldn't want to catch plague!" Elsewhere, the tiny bird tweets to Strange, "Of course I will. When you're a bird, you don't have to worry about things like these. Since we can fly about as we please, nothing out here troubles us for long. Human boys have much more cause for concern." It pauses tweeting for a minute, cocking its head side to side in the precise way only a bird can, before reluctantly adding, "It is a little boring though. Not much left to see. If only I had something to read." Elsewhere elsewhere, "Is that so young man?" the tall man says to Strange, still sounding like he's addressing his young nephew for the first time, despite Strange introducing himself as a doctor. "You shouldn't worry about something like that. Everything's okay, so come on and calm down." Strange can already see bandages wound under the man's coat, through the fact he doesn't seem to own a shirt beneath it. His sleeve wrists are also stained with blood, but it isn't his. The jarring creak of the door announces the Batter's arrival behind him, and then behind again, Zero, up the packed dirt path. "Would you want to be a nice boy and try to find something for me?" says Dedan, as if Strange had suddenly said something to evince some idea that he's both overeager and disappointed. "I'd like to know what day it is, since it will have been today for a long time soon . . . Won't it?" Yuuki, the sole person left behind in the 'house', no matter how she might try, can't find anything with a functional label. It's all just blurry vagueries of half-remembered letters, printed in black that probably was factory stamped and precise at one point. Nothing resembles the queer silver fleshes or fortune tickets or the manifest colours or days of the week she's picked up so far. A plastic book is filled with taxonomical drawings of flowers and bugs, plants and animals, which are clearly defined enough to recognize as a sort of field guide, but the text is all just so much blotting. The jerky is just boring. Bland, salty, filling, and high in calories.
August Kohler	Brambles cut into August's ankles more than they do Dietrich's, slicing them open raw and bloody, causing him to grimace sharper as he's stung. When they come to a stop, August considers striking Enoch down, but... Janine said this isn't a boss rush, so he'll trust her. This is some sort of vision, or memory, something, then. When Enoch tells them to come to the cottage and go west, August waits for him to leave, and then moves to talk to Janine. "Do you have /any/ idea what's going on, then? I don't trust him but he seems...nice." After talking with Janine and getting some bearings on direction, and also checking the grass and brambles, August speaks again. "Are we in an actual Earth-like world? Is this what Elsen used to be like?" And then, Dietrich starts marching west, trying to get to the cottage. If there's a plague...they need to avoid it.
Zero Kiryu	"You couldn't agree. You, and the Queen? So you left. Went looking for something that you couldn't find, and only recently returned with your current solution. Is that right?" Zero asks, stuffing his hands in the pockets of his coat as he follows after. "Then Purification isn't what you intended to do from the start. It's just the only option you're sure of now." "What were you hoping to find, out there?" He wonders.
Janine Liberi	"Sure have," Janine says in response to Enoch asking if she had already 'met them.' "Yeah, they did," when he suggests they sent her to look for him. The easiest lies she ever told. While she saved him, she still can't help but see the fat pig oozing through the pipes of the sugar factory, braying that he was a god. Hence, she doesn't feel the slightest bit of guilt at sending him on a long tumble. She watches him stomp away and says, "I'm still not a very good person. But that's okay." More to herself than August and Tina. "Anyway, c'mon. I can only presume the others are around here. Let's find them." Catherine erupts from her form in a flash of gold, and lashes August and Tina with threads before Janine flies into the air, pulling them along. Once she gets high enough, she puts out the call over the radio. "August, Tina and I met Enoch. He's going to the cabin to the west. Let's reunite there." And with that, she goes flying at high speeds, leaving Tina and August to experience a very uncomfortable flight.
Doctor Strange	"Everything is okay," says Present!Strange to Dedan. The emphasis is placed on the second word. It's okay now. No5 great, but okay. It won't be okay later. There isn't a way to change time--but there is sometimes wiggle room, within its confines. He recalls the date on the post-it calendar. He shares the day's date with Dedan. Perhaps... perhaps he can see what the other Guardian, Japhet, is up to. He disappears in a flash of green light, traveling back in time to the momenbt he touched the image of Dedan. "It's been today for a long time," says the Strange before Japhet. "But if you'd like a book to read, there's still time. I have some of my own you could borrow." Perhaps now would be a good time to see about that wiggle room. Are they being given a chance to nudge things in the right direction? Can a choice word here possibly prevent their downfall? He should at least try. He owes it to Elsen to try. Too overt, and things will fight back. But, the right word, at the right time... He recalls the pages of the books in the library. "One condition... just remember that things in life aren't always like books. People will do things that don't make sense. It isn't your fault."
Yuuki Kuran	Chewing on jerky, left alone in the House, Yuuki brings her legs up to a crosslegged sit and pulls out the books on birds and plants and things - the 'field guide' - and pocketing the crayons for later. The rest of the packet - the useful things, she tries to find a different pocket for. String, bottled water, extra jerky, everything gets stuffed into a coat pocket before she moves about closing the box to not let all the goodness out. It's a tiny gesture, and a futile one considering her purpose, and the fact that the whole place is a half-remembered dream, but so far, things have been made 'more real' by the group's passage. Perhaps a pocket full of dreaming gewgaws from a survival crate would come in handy. With that handled, Yuuki closes her eyes and watches through the perception of her familiar, placed on Zero's shoulder, which gives her a decent idea of what's going on... Sort of. She's content to be a passive actor. In the House, she can smell if George is coming.
Priscilla	Marching west isn't hard; it's towards the setting sun, the almost toxic orange glare of which is slowly fading on the fuzzy and imprecise horizon. It's muddy and hot and filled with unpleasant plants, but if one stops to think on it, there isn't a mosquito or fly to bother them the whole way, but only the squelching of their boots and the improbable number of sheer drops and jagged rocks up on this high canyon. Eventually, you crest one more ridge, and come upon a 'cottage' that's more of a cabin, if not sort of a shed, clearly cut together out of all the trees that still had brown wood, rather than being so sickly and ashen as the ones outside. Strange grabs the date from the calendar page for Dedan. There's a long pause, and then the extremely tall, probably once military man finally says, simply, ". . . Actually, it doesn't really matter. It isn't that day anymore anyway. Thank you anyways. Have this." A Wednesday was found. Strange talks to the little bird, and the bird talks back. "Super neat! Books are my favourite. You can bring it to the cottage on the west side of the canyon, right? Be careful not to fall." says Japhet, still apparently ignoring the fact the Sorcerer Supreme flies, then flutters away. Around that time, at precisely nine o'clock, Zero is left in the cottage with the Batter, and Strange disappears. The Batter slowly steps into the middle of the cottage, glancing from under his cap back at Zero. The front of his tunic is still torn, just a little. "You're thinking too hard when we're almost at the end." he says. "But you're right. It is the only thing left." He stares up at Dedan. Up. He shouldn't have to stare up, should he? Neither should Zero. Not much at least. Dedan wasn't that tall. Not in Zone 1. "Where they came from . . . no, where they ended up." he replies to Zero. "Sometimes the truth doesn't offer any help." The ground palpably rumbles beneath the two, quavering in rhythmic tempo that causes the dust to rise from between the wooden floorboards. "Who's that?" the Batter asks Dedan, with the kind of flat tone that suggests he already knows. "I'm looking for someone." Dedan, somehow looking way down, replies. "Huh? Oh, you'll like him. He's good with kids." Yet again, the reply is so . . . oddly nonspecific. Even Zero can't tell if he's actually talking to the Batter. It's a hundred times more intense of a feeling than when the real Dedan in Zone 1 obstinately referred to the group like Elsens. "If you're looking for your mother, Don't worry, she'll come back soon. She just went to see the new world. She is a very important person, you know. Once she is back, she will restart all of this, everything will work again. We will rebuild everything with the power of our bare hands. No exhaustion shall stop us! We will be builders of the future. It's going to be good, you'll see! We'll ride a pedalo together. Have you ridden a pedalo before? Bah, it's great, you'll see."
Priscilla	The rumbling resolves as, even more impossibly, the titanic bulk of Enoch somehow squeezing his way through the normal-sized door of the flimsy little cottage. Where he rears up to almost his full height, somehow the roof doesn't smash to flinders over his head. Some trick of perspective makes it seem as if his bald scalp somehow never quite reaches, such that he fills up most of the cottage's available room without quite touching the walls. A little singsong tweet follows a tiny bird fluttering down the chimney, comically landing on his other side, across from Dedan. It's quite the assembly for the teenagers catching up through the front door, as everyone has so little space as to be forced to stand all roughly in the same spot when Strange reappears. "I see we can count on you!" Enoch rumbles to you --all of you, somehow-- with his hands on his belly. Japhet tweets, "Thank you about the book! In these times of misery, a book is a very precious treasure." Enoch continues. "Maybe we could keep you company while you wait, if you like." "We can talk about the weather, about the world, about fate." twitters Japhet. Even Dedan adds, "Perhaps we will even dare already sketch out the maps for the countries that will be ours." "What do you think, little one?" Enoch asks, in the singular. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8INeip9pioI
August Kohler	August is starting to get the picture, though he's missing part of the conversation to fully understand. He just decides he wants to understand one thing, before whatever happens with these three happens. As he squeezes into the cabin, August asks one thing. It's a little vague, but... "So, at the end of all of this, what is your goal, your dream?" August wants to understand what their intentions were, that led to all of this.
Janine Liberi	"Don't even bother," Janine says to August. "It's pretty clear at this point. They're not talking to us. They're talking to whoever actually experienced these events." She gives a half-shrug. "I don't know if it's Hugo or Elphet or the Queen or whoever at this point."
Zero Kiryu	"I was like you, once." Zero looks at the Batter, somewhere between an angry glare and a pitying look. It's an extremely confused expression. He continues, "I thought I knew what was in store for me, so I didn't really plan ahead. I took up my gun and I decided that I would kill the person who had made me this way and if that's all I got to do with my life then... that would be fine. So I just didn't bother. Explaining myself. Getting attached to almost anything. Not even... trying to save myself." "Just because you don't intend to outlive your mission doesn't mean your Choir won't." His gaze is drawn upwards, to Dedan. But Dedan isn't who he's interested in-- and besides, he's barely familiar with this being. Distant memories of him talking trash to an Elsen echo through his mind, hazy and uncertain. Were they his memories, or a phantom from someone else? Sometimes it's hard to tell. But the remark about the pedalo does draw his attention, for a moment. A clearer memory strikes him. A half-baked tunnel of love in a river of plastic.
Priscilla	"Dream?" Dedan replies to August, in some semi-lucid defiance of Janine's expectations, though hardly deconfirmation in the slightest. "What a clever little rascal we have here!" It's the bird, Japhet, that speaks immediately. "A future where every one of us will be the guardian of a universal happiness!" he says. "Where every man will have work to do and actively participate in maintaining harmony." Dedan says. "Where you may dream of a happier life at any moment, and where our sons can feel the same hope we do." Enoch says. "Of course, maybe you do not understand much of this grown-up talk . . ." Japhet trills. "Perhaps you will have fast forgotten this handful of words, the first start of light in the shade of the world." "So, go on out. Have fun. Make the most of this new land which will soon be reborn from its still warm ashes." Dedan says. "You don't have time to lose to the lyrical remarks of three crazy utopists!" Enoch grins. Japhet laughs, in his little tweety bird sighing laugh. "The future only waits if we trace it, and only our arms and our endeavours will make it a haven on earth." says Dedan. "I promised you cake, and I will keep my promises; you will be swimming in an ocean of candy soon!" says Enoch. "No worry shall reign in my kingdom, for I will wipe the tears off the faces of my subjects." says Japhet. "You have your own homes to go back to. This one is mine." says the Batter. The world dissolves. The blackness returns. Yuuki, sat back in the house, can hear the hum of an electric fan. At the two unoccupied workstations, some increasingly conscious mind remembered that computers went there. Real computers. Ones with glowing screens. Screens with things on them. Important things. The thought unbidden: 'Hello mama.' 'Papa left. I don't like him anyways.' 'I hope you'll be back soon.' 'I made three friends today.' 'The tall mister told me that he'd take me to ride a pedalo, and that we'd all work together to build the world.' A glowing white ring appears in the void; a flat and simple halo that floats serenely on its own. 'The little bird told me that he'd show me the sky and the clouds, and that I wouldn't have to be scared ever again.' A second white halo joins the first, side by side. An alpha and an omega. 'The big mister told me he'd make me an ocean of cake.' A third white halo appears, and completes the trinity. The third and final follower and disciple added on. 'Today was a good day.' '. . .' 'I would like you to come back soon.' Chapter 3 The world in a window.