Moss and Bones

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Off to the side of the lake is a relatively small man-made pond, filled up with water from the lake itself. Inside this pond is a collection of five rusted cages, arranged facing each other. Back when the island had a thriving community, these cages were used for anyone who disturbed the peace of life. Rather than any form of corporal punishment, offenders were instead put inside one of the cages and made to stand in the lake in silence to reflect on their actions. The water in the pond typically came up to a person's waist but in some cases of severe storms, there could be a chance for the water level within the pond to rise. Around the edges of the circle are a pair of chairs, for people to watch over those inside the cages to ensure they were properly reflecting.
Aura
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#31

Post by Aura »

Tony rummaged through his bag in search of his first-aid kit. He hadn't reached in there for a while, and he still felt like some of the stuff in there he was either finding for the first time, or had completely forgotten about. And it was when he laid a hand on what he thought might have been the kit when he felt hit foot leave the ground, and he realized that the mud was no longer at his feet, but coming towards his face.

With one solid tug of his ankle, Paloma sent him plummeting to the ground, smacking into the wet earth. The abrupt impact stunned him, and it took him a few moments to get his head back up to speed. His first motion once he was back was to sputter as some of the mud had gone in his mouth. The wind was knocked out of him, and he attempted to regain his breath as he started picking himself back up.
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#32

Post by VoltTurtle »

Amber stared at the baseball bat tightly clutched in her hands in response to Colin's request.

She gazed at the dry blood that still coated it, despite the damp conditions. Whoever it was that Paloma had killed with this weapon had been done in a long time ago. The only person she had murdered, the only name that had been attributed to her over the announcements, was Abel. It was, in a way, a memento of his death, and a somber reminder of how short the time she had left really was. "I... don't think I want to give you the bat," she finally answered, solemnly. "I... I think this is what Paloma used to kill my boyfriend, Abel, and..."

The rain continued to come down, heavy droplets striking the top of her head like a drum as she continued to stare at the bat. Did she really want to carry around such a grim artifact of her boyfriend's demise? It would probably hamper her mental state, and it wasn't like she was ever going to actually use it, but maybe that was the point she was trying to make. "Maybe it doesn't make any sense, but I don't want this to be used to hurt anyone else," she stated, firmly. "So I think I want to keep it until I can get rid of it forever, if that's okay."

Before she could hear a response from Colin, there was suddenly a stir. Paloma had apparently finally made a move, dragging Tony into the mud with her. Amber reacted immediately, on instinct, screaming at her. "Hey, what the fuck? I said stop fighting!"
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#33

Post by Melusine »

"Shut the fuck up," she said to Amber while elbowing Tony in the face. She knew it connected because she felt this thud underneath her.

Her hands searched for whatever she could grab. She didn't want to run away empty handed and starve. There was no way this was happening again. She gave Tony another hit to the face and grabbed the bag. He didn't let go.

"Give it to me," her nails dug into his skin, "just fucking stop."

She pulled the bag out of his hands since he had finally let go. Paloma looked behind her. People had obviously noticed that she wasn't as dead as they liked her to be. As she managed to free herself from the mud and the mess she had made, she got up and hugged the bag.
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#34

Post by Aura »

"What the... fuckin'-!"

Tony struggled with Paloma for his bag. He was still getting his bearings back, but one thing that he knew for sure was that he couldn't let Paloma run off with his bag. It had his food, his medical supplies, and all of the other stuff that would give him a fighting chance to survive. He was pretty decently strong, or at least he thought so, but Paloma's nails in his hand broke his grip as he yelped. He wasn't sure whether she had broken the skin, but he didn't have the time to speculate. He needed his stuff back.

He got to his feet and made a fast step towards Paloma, reaching out for his bag.

"Give my stuff back!"
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#35

Post by Melusine »

There was a brief moment that Paloma could have gotten away with the bag but she had thrown it away by turning back. Tony, and by default everyone else who had bothered to watched the scene, had their eyes on her. She had felt small underneath Colin’s boot but right now she felt like she was nothing. She was hated. She was a waste of space that people desperately wanted to fill in with something else than her

“Fuck.”

It was her only response. There were no way she could make the situation better. She couldn’t beg, she couldn’t scream, she couldn’t wake up from this nightmare.

She raised the bag above her head. Paloma looked at Tony then looked at the lake. A part of her wanted to throw into the lake to ruin his supplies, another part of her wanted to take whatever luck she’s had left and try to make a run for, but in the end, she did a combination of the two. It wasn’t the best, but it might have saved her life.

Paloma wasn’t a sporty person, but she played a mean dodge ball. Everyone who looked had saw the bag fly toward Tony. Paloma was already gone the moment it had struck the boy in the chest. It was a mixture of what she needed: to spite and to escape. It was better than being caught again. Paloma knew she would be hungry again, but it was better than being dead.

“YEET!”

She didn’t bother to look back this time. Paloma just ran, wiping the blood away from her eyebrow. There was screaming. There was her name. She didn’t answer. She ran. Her feet suddenly had stopped digging into the mud.

((Paloma is now going there.))
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#36

Post by Aura »

With Tony reaching out, he wasn't able to catch his bag properly when Paloma threw it at him. So instead of getting his stuff back cleanly, he got hit in the chest with the full weight of a loaded duffel bag and stumbled backwards, glad that at least Paloma hadn't gotten away with his supplies.

As he backpedaled from the weight of the bag hitting him, his calf swung backwards into one of the chairs that was sitting there, and the weight and shape of the chair kept it from being kicked away easily. Instead, Tony was the one who wound up toppling over, falling backwards over one of the chairs.

However, Tony didn't feel himself hit the ground. He felt an extreme pain in his midsection, and he seemed to be stuck in mid-fall, or at least that was how it felt. His bag bounced off of his chest and fell to the ground, showcasing an increasingly large red stain on his shirt. A pipe that Tony had failed to notice beforehand had been planted between the two chairs, and the way that he had tripped caused him to fall onto it at the right angle and velocity for it to pierce his body, and it wound up going deep enough to just barely poke through the other side.

Tony saw the stain on his shirt, and he knew that in an instant, something horrific had happened. The point of impact felt as though it were on fire, burning intensely with a wound that he could not escape from.
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#37

Post by Catche Jagger »

He should have expected that Amber would go with some weird bullshit answer rather than just handing over the bat like a reasonable person. Like, now was really not the time for sentimental bullshit like “I need to bury the weapon to put things to rest.” Now was the time for people to arm up and band together.

But, though most people weren’t violent psychopaths, most were ridiculously stupid, and Colin had no qualms about making that clear.

“That’s fucking ridiculously stupid.” He replied flatly, before making his way over to Aliya in hopes of getting this bullshit fixed up.

However, it wasn’t long after he joined her by the medical supplies that something happened between Paloma and the other guy, but by the time Colin turned to look, Paloma.

“What the fuck happened? Where’s Paloma?” He shouted, looking around at the others.
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#38

Post by Deamon »

Aliya had thought she had her emotions under control.

That had been her first mistake.

Every other mistake had cascaded from that one. It was all her fault in the end. If she had never gone after Paloma to being with nothing that had followed would have occurred. But she hadn't and it all had, she would have to own that. She would have to own it and know that her actions had directly led to Tony getting hurt, and he was hurt badly.

She had been bandaging up Colin's head when the scuffle started. She had no idea what had happened because they were a distance away and her back was to it. By the time she'd realized and reacted it was finished. Paloma was running and she got to witness Tony fall. Her legs took off at a sprint before she realized what she was doing. The mud closer to the lake caused her to slip partway there, mud splattering up her legs as a searing pain tore through her knees, but she forced herself up and kept going until she reached Tony.

Colin was yelling something but she heard none of it, her focus solely on the friend she had failed.

"Tony! Tony, Tony," Her voice was hoarse and ragged. "Shit, shit shit shit." It looked bad. She didn't have any idea what she could do for him.

"What happened? Can I move you?"
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#39

Post by VoltTurtle »

As it turned out, Amber's initial impression of Colin was actually not too far from the truth. She opened up about her feelings and her perfectly sensible desire to keep the baseball bat out of the hands of murderers and that was his response? She was definitely going to keep the baseball bat now, he made that much clear.

She wasn't going to let him distract her, however. As much as she wanted to offer up a witty retort, the fact that Paloma just started running away at top speed from the scene was far, far more important. Amber couldn't allow her to escape twice in a row. She had to be caught, she had to answer for what she did.

"PALOMA!"

Failing to notice Tony's grievous injury, Amber took off after Paloma once again, screaming her name and sprinting at her at top speed. Amber couldn't screw it up this time, if Paloma got away again, who knows if Amber would ever see her and finally get those answers she wanted?

Amber sprinted out of the clearing around the lake, back into the treeline, dodging vegetation to the best of her ability and keeping her eyes on Paloma. She didn't know how long she spent running after the other girl, Paloma was surprisingly fast despite presumably nursing some kind of head injury. What she did know, however, was that the chase ended when she tripped over an exposed root, causing her to lose her balance and quickly crash down into a puddle of mud.

Disoriented and fumbling, Amber forced herself back up, but when she finally took a look around, Paloma was no longer anywhere in sight. Trying to follow the sounds of her footfalls wouldn't help either; the noise from the rain drowned out everything else. Paloma had gotten away again, and Amber had failed again.

Groaning, she picked herself up out of the pool of mud, brushing herself off to the best of her ability. Letting out a frustrated sigh, she dejectedly looked around, trying to figure out where exactly she found herself. She was nowhere near the lake, now. She would probably have trouble finding her way back to it, even if she tried. At least the others would probably be fine, she thought.

So, what's the plan now?

Well, I guess a good start would be finding somewhere out of this rain.

((So she left, her frustration weighing on her heavily.))
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#40

Post by Aura »

(GMing of Aliya approved by Deamon.)

Tony had a hard time focusing on anything around him, as the pain in his torso was nearly blinding. He couldn't adjust his focus, nor do anything about it. Every attempt to so much as shift a limb led to more agony, and lying still left him to the mercy of gravity, which gave him pain as well. He couldn't even summon enough concentration to try to figure a way out of this situation of his.

"Fuckin'... hurts..."

His voice was a low mumble that struggled to escape a mouth that wanted to groan and scream through gritted teeth. He spotted someone running towards him, who he quickly realized was Aliya. Having someone familiar helped him to focus on her, but that didn't assist the fact that he had nothing to say that he hadn't already grumbled just moments ago. However, at her suggestion of helping him off of the sharp pipe that had impaled him, he had no reason to turn her down.

"Sure, just... help, yeah."

Aliya looked over him for a moment as she wondered about the best place to grab him for the most leverage, and she ultimately chose his upper arms, gripping them near his biceps. She counted down so he would know when she was going to pull, which he assumed was to help him brace for the moment, since he had no way of helping out.

"Three... two... one!"

Aliya's grip tightened and the jerked Tony towards her with everything that she could muster. And it was then that Tony felt pain again. Extreme pain as the pipe slid through his body once more. However, it was only momentary, as Aliya's strength was enough to get him off of the pipe and onto his feet again. When he realized that he was free, a spark of ecstasy overtook his brain. He had escaped. Well, to be more accurate, Aliya had freed him, but the important thing was that he was free.

Once that thought passed through his head, and he had a second to get used to standing again, Tony collapsed to the ground. Although he had been freed from the pipe, he still had a gaping wound that went straight through his body that was exposed to the elements. The shock of having the pipe removed wound up being enough to send him to unconsciousness, as his now-unobstructed wound started to bleed at a faster rate.
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#41

Post by Catche Jagger »

And, just like that, Amber had run off after the bitch, taking the bat with her. Even if Colin’s head was mostly bandaged up now, it meant exactly squat if he was still running around with no weapon to fight back with.

“Fucking great… just fucking perfect…” Colin muttered as he turned to Aliya to see if she’d joined the ever-growing club of people that had run off on him.

But no, she was still around attending to that other guy (Tony? That sounded right.) who had gotten into something with Paloma.

As he stepped closer to the pair, it became difficult to miss the fact that Tony had found himself impaled on some sort of metallic thing following the scuffle.

He’d been impaled by Paloma.

Aliya helped pull the guy up off of the pipe as Colin stood there dumbly, only for Tony to collapse to the ground. A big wound in your torso doesn’t go away when you pull the thing out. Now he’d only bleed more.

He was going to die.

Maybe Aliya could save him. Patch it up?

Paloma had killed again. Colin had disarmed her and that hadn’t accomplished jack shit. Now, this Tony guy was going to die. Tony was going to die because Colin hadn’t had the guts to do what was clearly necessary from the start.

This made two, now.

It wasn’t a thought that drove him to wander away from that place so much as a simple feeling, a drive to get out and do something that wasn’t this. Something that wasn’t going to drain him and leave him with nothing.

“Sorry…” He muttered, maybe to Aliya, as he trudged away.

There was but one thing Colin McCabe knew in that instance: he was a fucking coward.

((Colin McCabe continued in Crush the World Down))
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#42

Post by Deamon »

She pulled Tony free only to realize her mistake partway through the process. That mistake was given physical form when Tony immediately collapsed into unconsciousness. Aliya looked around for Amber or Colin but neither of them were there. They'd been abandoned, Tony being left to his fate. It stung and it angered her. She had gone out of her way to help Colin and he didn't even have the decency to stick around. Instead, he had run as soon as things had gotten tough. Although saying the situation she was currently in was tough was an understatement. Aliya wasn't going to fool herself, there wasn't much she could do for Tony she lacked the training or equipment to give him the proper treatment he required. She felt a hole open up in her gut as she stared at his prone form.

He was going to die.

It didn't matter what she did. Tony would die on the island, the only thing she could reasonably do was delay the inevitable. So that was exactly what she decided to do. She picked up the deadweight of Tony's body and carried him to the driest part of the area she could, making sure he was under some trees, then she put him in the recovery position and limped over to where the packs were. Picking one up—it didn't matter whose was whose anymore—she returned the prone form of her friend. With the greatest care, she lifted his top and took a look at the wound, her face twisting into a grimace when she saw it. Tears started to well up in her eyes as she looked it over. It was a hole clean through his chest that she could see out the other side of. The certainty that she couldn't save Tony's life was only solidified at that moment.

Heedless of that knowledge Aliya pressed on, removing items from the first aid kit as needed. Sterile dressings, antiseptic wipes, dressings, everything that could potentially help. Aliya pulled a pair onto her dirtied hands in some sort of attempt to keep the wound getting infected by her own attempt to help. She cleaned the wound as best she could and tried to seal it as much as possible. Her actions were careful but not gentle, Tony was unconscious and she was working on a time limit. After what felt like an agonizingly long time Aliya finished. Her work was sloppy, any medical professional would have been embarrassed to put together what she had. But for her needs, it would do. The wound had been cleaned, disinfected and covered on both sides, she had no way of closing it but she put pads in place and taped them down, sticking adhesive bandages over that and then wrapped the whole thing in bandages. She also placed the emergency blanket over his body.

Then she sat and prayed he would wake up.
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#43

Post by Aura »

(Timeskip approved by Deamon)

Tony did not make any further movements once Aliya finished patching him up and placed the blanket over him. He looked as though he was being prepared for a burial, which considering his present state, wouldn't be much of a surprise. With a hole clear through his body and no hospital in sight, his chances of survival were minimal at best. Even over the course of the night, the only indication that Tony was still alive was the slow rise and fall of his chest as he continued to breathe.

Morning came, and Tony's name was absent from the announcements, further proving his continued life. However, he didn't hear any of it, because he was still asleep, warm underneath the blanket and completely cut off from the rest of the world.

... "Nnnngh..."

A low groan came from Tony as he lightly turned his head to the side. He started to shift, his movements feeling slowed and restricted. He could feel the wind blowing through and onto his face, and he opened his eyes to see he emergency blanket on top of him. He didn't remember going to sleep, so this was weird. He began to rise, but felt something odd in his chest, something weird and restrictive, so he rolled over to try to pick himself up in a more comfortable position.

"Ugh..." He was groggy and shaky as he began his rise, slowly and on tired legs. "Wha' happened?" He asked himself audibly.
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#44

Post by Deamon »

Aliya had tried to stay awake to watch over Tony. He was in no condition to be left alone after all. But eventually, her exhausted body and mind had given up the fight and she had passed into slumber sat up against a tree. As Tony slowly awoke and took in his surroundings Aliya's head was hung but she too slowly came to as he moved and questioned what happened. Her eyes softly blinked a few times against the light and as she saw him awake and moving a smile played at the corner of her mouth. For a time it seemed that she had succeeded.

She didn't have time to bask in a momentary victory against the hands of fate however. She knew that it was a temporary respite, eventually Tony would die. She was looking at a dead man. Regardless, she had to make do with how things were and that meant she needed to settle him down. As Tony, in his confused state was insisting on moving around.

"Hey, hey, don't move around so much." She said she stood, holding her arms out to steady her friend. "You got hurt by Paloma, and it's..." She trailed off a looked away for a split-second. "It's really bad. You need to sit down and rest."

She was talking to a dead man.
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#45

Post by Aura »

Tony was some part of the way through trying to get back to his feet when Aliya came over and stopped him, telling him to settle down because he needed rest. He was pretty sure that he had already been resting... but he did still feel pretty tieed too, so Aliya probably had a point. He laid himself back down and tried to get comfortable.

Paloma... Tony remembered her starting shit out at the lake. She was swinging that bat of hers like crazy and freaking everyone out, but... yeah, she didn't do too good against a bunch of people. Hell, even against one person she did pretty bad, since Aliya managed to mess her up good. But then again, that was Aliya. She was on the wrestling team, and Tony was pretty sure that he couldn't take her in a fight either, so no fault there. The fault was with Paloma acting like a fucking maniac in the first place.

Also, that she messed him up. That part was fuzzier, but he just remembered it hurting like all hell. He raised his head to try to get a better view of Aliya when he talked to her. When she mentioned his injury, he couldn't just let her leave it after saying it was really bad. That was important information that he needed to know.

"So how bad is it?""
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