hadriel_logs | INTRO LOG: FACE OFF

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INTRO LOG: FACE OFF

Who: New arrivals and everyone else!
What: The intro log for November. Don't get your face eaten!
Where: The colosseum and all around the city.
When: November 10th-17th
Warnings: Monster-related violence, people lamps, general unpleasantness, mass confusion.

You wake up on the hard earth of the colosseum. By the state of things and the various aches and pains in your body, you've probably been passed out there for awhile. A few things should immediately become clear to you upon an initial assessment.
1. You're not alone
2. You're near other people who look to be in a similar state.
3. You're also near an assortment of human shaped lamps.
4. You're also near something that skitters off into the shadows of the colosseum.
Of all of these alarming things, the skittery object might be your largest concern. Be wary when turning corners or shutting out the lights: the Hunters work best when your vision is obscured, so their gelatinous form is even harder to spot. Their main goal will be to kill people of course, though they prefer to hide in corners and smaller rooms. Watch out when trying to work through the halls of the colosseum to find the outdoors- they're surprisingly quick, and they prefer to kill their prey by opening their face-flaps and wrapping their mouths around your head. Fun!

More information on Hunters can be found here!

Second largest concern? Maybe it's the people lamps. Maybe it's the actual people around you. Whatever it is, be sure to familiarize yourself with it quickly. The devil you know is better than the devil you don't, after all.

All done with the horrible monsters and awkward greetings? Try your hand at exploring the rest of the city! Find a house, find a new monster, or simply scavenge for supplies until your little heart is content. Good luck, and enjoy your stay in Hadriel!

► This log covers November 10th-17th.
► Feel free to make your own logs, as well!
► All characters now arrive with phones that have network communication.
► Please put your character's name and open/closed in the subject line of your starters!

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"Okay, yeah." Chris agrees, turning his attention back to the window and looking down. He's already the most uncoordinated person in the world and with an injured knee even more so, so he's just resigning himself to that this isn't going to be fun.

Shoving the window open as wide as possible, he leans out and twists around to grab the upper ledge, pulling himself out enough to sit backwards on the ledge. Okay, so far so good, carefully try to get his good leg out, great. Bending the other leg enough to get it through is difficult but he manages, so now all he had to do is push off and drop.

Ugh. He logically knows it'd be safer to turn around and hang off the ledge to drop but he's pretty sure that'll take a lot more grace than he can manage, so instead he just takes a deep breath and reminds himself that the longer he takes the more danger Bob is in, then pushes off the edge and drops.

"Damnit." He hisses the curse somewhat breathlessly from where he landed, nothing hurt any worse than before except his bad leg, which he's thinking he'd rather have cut off at this point for how bad it feels. For just a moment he remembers, out of nowhere, the joke he made about chewing off his own leg when he and Sam were stuck in the cable car, and it seems like a whole other life.

Focus, Chris. He shoves himself upright from the crouch he'd been in, all his weight on his good leg and glad the distance and his glasses probably hide the tears at the corners of his eyes. "Okay, ready!" Catch the dog, whatever you do, Chris.

Bob lets out a ragged breath between his teeth, and pulls Rocco up and out of his jacket. He checks the space behind them, but doesn't wait around; the things are going to likely close in at any moment. He can't waste time.

He puts the gun on the sill next to him for the moment, and then puts his torso out the window, spreading his legs enough and leaning out, bending carefully, deeply, and eventually transferring a whimpering, squeaking Rocco to one arm, as he braces himself on the sill. Then, with a cringe, and a murmured apology, he grabs him hard by the collar and scruff, provoking a hurt, puppyish whimper, before he lowers him down as far as he can so his kicking bottom feet are within reach of Chris's hands.

Bob lets go and just prays that he has him, rearing back fast to grab the gun, clear the hall behind him again, before swinging his own leg out the window, one, and then the next.

Thankfully catching Rocco is easy with the small distance, and Chris pulls the puppy close to his chest and wraps a side of his singed coat gently around him. "Hey, little guy, you're okay."

And alright, now Bob's climbing down, so Chris need to get out of the way. He takes a step back onto his bad leg and it immediately gives out; he sinks to the ground and decides to just stay there for the moment, hugging Rocco gently and hoping once they're all out the monsters won't follow.

And that there aren't more monsters out here, too.

Bob hits the ground next to him. Rocco, normally affectionate and wriggly, is scared and still, and fundamentally all right with Chris- but unfortunately, his owner, not so much. Bob takes the puppy back, first and foremost, and then and only then recovers from the adrenaline fuelled protectiveness to decide that his human accomplice in all this needs to be seen to.

First question;

"Can you walk?"

Because this is a bad, bad spot to be.

Chris doesn't protest, handing Rocco back to Bob as soon as he reaches for him and taking a few moments to try to catch his breath.

"Y-Yeah." He doesn't actually know if it's the truth, but it's going to have to be. They can't stay here, after all, and after another second or two he gathers his strength and gets back to his feet again. Everything hurts at this point, not just his leg; his bruised ribs, where he'd been hit over the head, assorted tiny injuries he doesn't remember getting. It's only now just really hitting him truly how exhausted he is, after being awake nearly thirty hours and running and fighting for his life for the last ten or so of them, and this is a terrible time for his adrenaline to finally be running out.

"How far do you think before we're..." Far enough from the arena to be clear of the immediate danger.

"Far."

Is his bet, moving to reluctantly, carefully help him up. He's tired, too, but he's in better shape than Chris, and feels a sense of 'in it together.' Not often you jump out a window with a stranger after being attacked by monsters.

"Far, behind a locked door- and then I don't know what. This, this isn't Brooklyn."

"If they don't like light, finding somewhere that's really bright is the best bet." Chris responds, accepting the help up and balancing on his good leg for the moment until they actually start moving. "Locked doors don't tend to keep monsters out long. At least they didn't for us."

Back home. He's not totally sure how the wendigos got into the Lodge, but he knows the doors were locked, so focusing more on what the monsters don't like--light and fire, it seems--would probably be the most effective route.

"What happened?"

Now that they have their breaths a little, and are walking, and nothing is trying to kill them. Bob listens with one ear, while he tries to take assessment of the situation around them. A cave?

"With those monsters, I mean?"

Normally Chris would be looking around as well, trying to get an idea of where they are, but most of his concentration is on walking and on listening for anything following them. It takes a moment for him to catch the questions.

"You mean back home?" He's not actually sure how to explain; it's still horribly surreal, but... "We were uh... There were wendigos."

Bob is neither up on his horror lore, nor a fan of Hannibal the TV show or a big user of the internet, so the name draws a blank from him. He glances over and shakes his head.

Wendi-whats?

It's okay bro he had no idea what they were either aside from a vague notion that they were from some sort of legend.

"Really big cannibal monsters. Super fast, but they can't see you if you don't move. Don't like fire." Seems monsters in general might not like fire, which if that's true would turn out to be really handy.

"Cannibal- cannibal as they eat each other? Or do you mean human-eating."

Because Bob, who has problems with semantics at inappropriate moments, would argue that wendigos are not cannibals unless they eat other wendigos, or else he's missing something here.

Bob no this is not the time.

"I mean they were human to begin with, ate another human, got possessed by a spirit, then bam. Wendigo." It's said casually only because he's not thinking too much about it; it's too crazy and he's still in shock from it all. "Then they just... Keep hunting people."

"Oh."

Says Bob, as that clears that up.

Right.

"Cannibalism warning post, eh?"

"Like a super fucked up fairy tale moral, yeah." Except it's a cultural legend and not a fairy tale, and also real.

"That is fucked."

Bob agrees, as he keeps them walking- and ahead, there's a building, one with lights flickering in enough of the windows that he picks up the pace.

"Think there's a moral here?"

"No." It's uncharacteristically bitter of him, but no. He doesn't think there's a meaning to any of this or anything that happened at home; maybe he'll find some reason to it later, but right now it just seems like unpredictable chaos.

Butterfly effect and all that.

"Don't fucking. Wake up in fucking caves. With tacky lamps."

Says Bob, who might be in the slightest amount of shock, honestly.

He can't manage a laugh, but that's just so incredibly understated that it's funny somehow. "Yeah. Staying away from tacky lamps is always a good rule."

Seriously, why were those lamps even there? What were those monsters? How the hell did he--and Bob, and the other people that had been in the arena--get here, and where is here? "The fuck even..." It's under his breath, not really directed at anyone, just... This is all so crazy, and now that they're not immediately in danger--as far as they can tell anyway--it's starting to sink in.

"What's your name?"

Bob asks, not sure if he has already or not, or if he's just forgotten in with the fucking- whatever those were. Anti-lamp metaphors.

"Chris. You?" He thinks they had introductions, but he's not totally sure either. Doesn't hurt to have them again, anyway, and any talking is a welcome distraction.

"Do you have like... Any idea how we got here?" He asks, after a moment. "I don't remember anything between I think falling asleep and then waking up here." But considering his injuries and everything that happened he's not totally sure his memory of things is entirely trustworthy.

Edited 2015-11-30 04:13 (UTC)

"Bob." Right. Right, settling down now.

"I was at home. No monsters, just a normal work shift last night. Church in the morning. He didn't have a leash on him, either-"

That's all. Average, ordinary Bob.

"And what, you just like... Blinked and was here?" Great. It's not Bob's fault or anything that he doesn't know, but some idea of how and why this happened would be nice. He thought he'd finally gotten out of the nightmare the last several hours had been, and then he just ended up here.

"Went to sleep last night. Woke up this morning with the puppy crying and the lights out, and the bed a stone floor under my back."

He admits, with a shrug. No other way to put it, no explanation involved.

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INTRO LOG: FACE OFF

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