the way to dusty death

[Cicada]

((Hannah Kendrickstone, Olivia Fischer, and Irene Djezari continued from Until all our yesterdays are lighted fools...))

Three girls walked towards it.

It was an unscalable distance remaining. It was brick painted by dust and eternity. It was a titanic shadow cast over the path they walked. Echoes from three distinct pairs of shoes bleated weakly and were swallowed by the asylum's cold vine choked corpse. Ever lurking, following the girls as it stood perfectly still. The path was littered with thorny brambles of light foliage. Scattered leaves from long forgotten autumns.

Ruby orange blood splatters of a sun setting.

One girl smiled at the other two as best she could.

"Come on girls, we gotta keep moving."

Hannah.

"Come on!"

Her watchful eye scanned the other two.

"We don't hurry and those two creeps catch up with us."

In front of her at half a pace was Irene.

"Wouldn't have minded if they were with us though."

Irene's gun gently clattered with each step, in chitters of cold steel.

"Alan and Kait are kinda always like that anyway. Crazy plans on their brains and..."

Irene glanced back at Hannah, over her own lump of neck.

"... stuff."

"Yeah but no excuse for the stupid ideas. Hey Livvie? What do you think about them?"

The third girl half a pace behind startled.

Her feet carried her a bit faster.

"Oh,"

Olivia murmured.

She moved herself close into Hannah's gaze.

"Yeah, they were strange."

Olivia was silent.

Irene was silent.

Hannah was silent.




Silence.

Irene's feet found brief stumble.

Both Hannah and Olivia glanced over at the instinctive yelp, it cracked like whip or gunshot through their skins and brains.

Irene's body contorted madly for a moment. It mutated.

It settled.

"Where's your watch, Olive? Gotta check our ticks and tocks."

The shrill whispers of leaves cackling underfoot.

"Like it looks like it should be late-ish."

Olivia nodded briefly. To herself. She fumbled awkwardly with her bag, attention split.

Against walking on the cusp of hurriedly.

"I... Oh."

A quiet, bloodied mewl of frustration.

"I. Didn't bring one."

Hannah smiled, a smile that was a smile attempted.

"It's no big deal Livvie. The time isn't so important, yeah?"

"Hannah's right. Time is just a property of relating positions in space."

Irene paused to breathe.

"The infinity of space."

Olivia just nodded dumbly, and let her gaze drift into an unfathomable infinity.

Her chest. Her feet.

She took a quiet gulp of breath the other two didn't hear.

"It looks like it's going to be a chilly night though,"  Irene murmured at nothing in particular.

"Kinda like out in the desert, and all."

"I mean..." Hannah murmured.

Loud yet somehow to herself.

"We are by the ocean."

Hannah observed ocean. It cast a tremendous shadow in the distance, lurking beyond where eyes could see.

"You two girls pack your sweaters?"

Olivia glanced into her bag. Her eyebrows fell sharply, like a guillotine blade.

"No. I didn't think I'd need one."

Irene didn't immediately respond. They were closer now.

The slope of path began to carelessly level into the flatground of school yard or cemetery. The asylum was the horizon. Immediately, and in all distant futures.

A door before them opened, though not willingly. It's handle was a whispered suggestion, wood half eroded away by the chomping of something unseen and unknown to the girls. Time itself, perhaps. An enemy to them as any other element of nature. They passed on, away from the light of the sun. Hallways stretched on past where the eye could see, painted and bleached white as the bones of the dead. Hallways ended in darkness, in shadows that teased and tortured the eye with suggestions unfathomable.




Three girls walked in.

Hannah tisked.

"Earth to Irene, hello?"

"Wha?"

Irene glanced about.

Her eyes mindlessly followed the harsh angle of the ceiling.

Then floor. Thick blocks of ink swarmed the ground in relentless procession.

"Uh, yeah. Asimah insisted I bring a change of clothes..."

"... Because that's a thing she does. Olivia..."

She rummaged.

"... Can have the sweater."

From a thin scattered mess of fabrics a bundle of inert black was produced.

Run into Olivia's face.

"... Isn't that cold is it?"

She carefully watched Irene's reaction.

"But thanks... I'll keep it just in case."

The sweater changed hands. Irene nodded thickly.

Returned to her position erstwhile. Hannah nodded approval in the unfathomable distance.

"So it sucks that Olive doesn't have her watch..."

Olivia's attempts to scurry through her bag faltered. She was silently breathing.

Irene grew louder.

"... but, like, we can easily figure out the time from the way the sun's setting..."

As they walked deeper into the darkness.

Everyone briefly slowed, echoes of their feet vanishing into their own bodies.

"... like it's angle of the sun to the ground and how it casts a shadow and... "





Still speaking.

Brick and metal and paint were all eroded away, time scorching the wall in the polite nibbles and teethings of some force unseen and unknown. Doors on all sides, six doors for all eyes, themselves but a thin sheets of metal. Stoic. Stalwart. Windows did not exist in this world, only the weakest of ambient lights from behind them existed to be snuffed out. Flashlights were produced, and with them the shadows danced in a mad frenzy. Over everything, including the things that maybe weren't actually there.

Three girls walked on.

((All GMing approved))

[Emprexx Plush]

It was a good show. A real good show, okay? Would they be happy if she just gave them that? If she just threw up her hands, looked at the camera, and went, 'you got me?' 'cuz for a second, all the pageantry, all the fanfare or whatevs, all the detail, like...it got to her. It looked real. Like maybe this was legit, they were abandoned out in the middle of nowhere and maybe people were dying, and maybe she'd taken the quirky aesthetic a couple steps too far because she was scared and everything was fucked and she couldn't breathe and and and-

But no. That couldn't be right. It was just a really good trick, that was all. She hadn't seen any bodies, right? Just a bunch of other scared and confused people, and some of them had bought in, but not her. No, they got her, but not for long. Just like, a quick moment of weakness, and now it was over. She was just glad that Hannah and Olive hadn't seen her crack, because she'd never live that down after this all shook out, y'know?

And it had to shake out soon. Nobody could keep this kind of thing up long before the strings started to show. The trick was figuring out exactly what it was. A prank didn't really add up, because man, who would air this? Career suicide right there b o y z, nobody was stupid enough to bank it all on that. Unless it was some weird internet thing. Oh god, it could totally be some weird internet thing. If somebody came out of the bushes screaming "JUST A PRANK BRO," she could actually shoot them, it'd be so lame. Was the school cringey enough to do something like that, or like, did someone just sink a ton of cash into this? That couldn't be the case, because if that was the case, she was gonna get gif'd to death for letting Johnny Three go off earlier. And also for whatever embarrassing stuff she did in her sleep. She definitely did embarrassing stuff in her sleep, and they'd probably caught some of it before she came to on that beach.

Was it bad that that felt worse than this being real? Like, that had to be messed up, right? She really should deal with that when they got home, girl gotta sort her priorities out. Death was not worse than Meme Hell.

...probably.

It was easy to keep that kinda manic energy going as they trawled through the place together. The three of them shining flashlights all over the place felt like something out of a cheesy Scooby Doo spin-off where like, Daphne and Velma go off to college and pick up a spunky third wheel to tag along with The Forbidden Ship. Mysteries by day, pillow fights by night, and like, probably classes in there sometimes too whenever it was convenient for the plot. What kind of ghost would they be looking for here? The Asylum Abomination? The Glasspane Ghoul? The Disorderlies? Ugh, that one was terrible, just terrible, she was gonna have to up her game for-

The flashlight dropped out of her hands and rolled across the floor into the pool of congealed blood around what used to be a person. A good enough look and maybe you could tell who it used to be. A good sorority detective would hunt for clues, look around for signs, push past the disgust to prove that it wasn't real after all and the dead body was just a lot of food coloring and corn starch and old man Jenkins hiding in a mask while he jerked off in the closet. Irene wasn't a good detective though. At the moment, she wasn't really conscious enough to know what she was, other than running.

((Irene Djezari Continued Elsewhere))

[Maraoone]

There were a few ways Olivia defined herself. She defined herself as the girl with all the answers in the classroom, the one who could always raise her hand, who could always figure out how to integrate this and calculate the torque for that. She defined herself as the girl who always had a deck of cards in her bag, one who could play a mean game of Go Fish or Uno, or Solitaire if no one else was in the mood for some fun. She defined herself as the girl with the watches, the one who never arrived late, the one who herself defined her days in seconds and minutes and hours.

And in the past hour, her life had lost all meaning.

She looked in her bag, and the first thing she noticed was how alien it felt. As if she was rummaging in the purse of some other girl. Her old comb, something she'd left abandoned at the bottom, was the first thing she saw, its pink color immediately attracting attention. She dug her hand in, and felt a lump form in her throat as she felt emptiness in the inner right pocket. Where her cards were. And she dug her hands in further to the bottom, among wallets and clothes in disarray, and did not feel the leather of her brown watch. The smooth glass of its face. Her fingers yearned for this familiarity, yet she came up empty. And then her heart dropped as she remembered that she'd set it by her desk the night before. She hadn't worn it.

There were other things missing, too. Her notepad. A pocket book of poems. Other parts of her torn and thrown away. And as she dug further, she felt something cold, metal, but not cylindrical like the hinges her watch hung off of. Just long. Sharp. She pulled it up, and discovered that the island thought it sufficient to replace all these parts of her with a lobotomy pick. A lobotomy pick in an asylum.

And Olivia, her heart had started beating fast, she started breathing fast, yeah, but no, everything would be OK because she had Hannah and Irene, she had these girls to fill the time and fill her mind and drown away her thoughts, smother them away, everything would be fine because she was just with a couple friends from high school, because she just left a few things, no, more than a few things in her rush to leave the house yesterday morning, and she had somehow gotten a screwdriver, not a lobotomy pick, yes, everything was alright, they were just on some unexpected detour from their science trip, some detour that takes them from never-before-seen beaches to the edges of bell towers to dusk-shadowed asylums to rooms of black and gray, yes everything would be fine

and all of a sudden they near a shape. An oblong shape, in a corner. Curled up. And they go closer, Olivia and Hannah and Irene, they near it, and all of a sudden it is a she, was a she, was an Abby Floyd.

And all of a sudden, Irene runs, and slams into Olivia, knocks her into the wall. And Olivia stays there, stays there and stares at Abby's corpse, at the shadows that Irene's dropped flashlight casts as it rolls into Abby's blood into what was once inside Abby who was once walking and talking and defined as such and now she's just defined as a number as a victim and and

all of a sudden, 'they' does not pertain to Olivia and Irene and Hannah, there is no they because it is just she. Hannah runs after Irene. Leaves Olivia. And Olivia is left with a corpse. Olivia is left with a corpse, and a lobotomy pick, and Irene's sweater, and her flashlight, and she is left with nothing else, no cards, no watches, no answers to any of this. She is left with no one, and she is no one.

She leans against the wall. Breathes, takes in all the air that she can, in, out, in, out, breathes as if she is breathing for two people, for someone who cannot breathe anymore, breathes as if she can revive them, but it is not enough, it never will be enough. And she stares. She stares at Abby. At what was once Abby. And this is no longer some detour, she can no longer avoid looking in bags and looking at cameras because she is looking at a body, she is looking at the commencement of this game. She is looking at the first corpse she'd seen since she went to her great-uncle's funeral, except his body was clean and peaceful and lying straight and his eyes were closed and he had a bit of a smile, and Abby, she is dirty, she is bloody, she is curled up on the floor, and she is not peaceful, she did not go in peace, and Olivia will not go in peace, she will be another Abby, she will be shot or stabbed or burned, she will not be her great-uncle.

But as scared as she is, as much as she breathes and hyperventilates and pushes against the wall, she cannot leave. She is paralyzed. Because despite all her fear, she fears more being alone. Being hunted alone. She fears this game, and wants to go back, go back to their slight detour, to they. And maybe she can salvage something from the fragments of the previous day. Maybe Hannah can bring Irene back, and maybe they can stay as a group, and they can talk, and they can forget this ever happened.

So she waits, and waits, waits not in seconds and minutes and hours, as they have abandoned her, but in breaths, in blinks. But as she waits, the curves, the outlines of this body, the shadows it casts on the wall, she looks at them, and she realizes she will never ever forget this for as long as she lives, be it seventy years or seventy hours or seventy minutes. She has stared too long, she has burned its image into her mind.

And then it occurs to her that Hannah and Irene might not come back. It occurs to her that they've actually left her behind. She hadn't moved a bit, not an inch. If Irene had really left them behind, if Hannah hadn't been able to catch up to her, then all she had to do was go back to where they were. The flashlight was pointed at her, illuminated her. She should've been impossible to miss. But maybe Hannah was still chasing Irene. And if that was so, then that meant that maybe Irene was worth more to her than Olivia was. In other words, maybe it meant that Olivia was expendable. That she could do fine on her own. She couldn't, but that didn't matter to Hannah. She didn't matter. She didn't know if it was cursing at Hannah that did it or staring at Irene weird or being too nervous. Or if they just didn't care for her. But they'd left her behind.

Olivia knows when she's not needed. When she's not wanted. She's just wasting time. So, she slowly gets up. Pushes herself off the wall. Picks up her bags. Leaves Irene's bloodstained flashlight. Closes her eyes, sidesteps around the pool of blood. Says a quick prayer for Abby. And she leaves the room.

((Olivia Fischer continues in a concrete cave))

[Courtography]

The body had been there.

Now Irene was running and the girl's dead body had been so real. It was so different than a classmate dramatically falling to the floor of the stage under a spotlight colored red by a gel. It was like really dead, and it was truly lifeless and would never pop up again as soon as the lights were out and no one could see her anymore.

Hannah was running after Irene now, leaving Livvie behind. She felt bad in some distant place, but she couldn't let her friend get away. But she was, as their footsteps loudly echoed around the building. Irene was getting away, running faster than her. Hannah's legs ached, and her lungs felt close to bursting. She wanted to yell at Irene to stop, but she didn't have the air to spare.

Eventually she stopped, her hands on her knees. Her breaths were deep and fast. Irene had run away from her. She wasn't fast enough to catch her in the dark halls of the asylum. She had failed.

She stood and breathed for a bit longer, then drank a large part of a bottle of water. She needed it after the running.

Hannah started walking again.

She'd find Irene.

(Hannah Kendrickstone continued in The List of Adrian Messenger.)