What if You... Wanted to go to Heaven... But god said, "ᴜɴᴇxᴘᴇᴄᴛᴇᴅ ɪᴛᴇᴍ ɪɴ ʙᴀɢɢɪɴɢ ᴀʀᴇᴀ"

[CondorTalon]

((Cassandra Argent continued from SOMEONE SAW ME COVERED IN BLOOD AND ASKED WHO I WAS AND I PANICKED AND SAID "LUIGI".))

In the corner of a room of a dingy, run-down excuse for a house in the poorest urban neighborhood of the not quite island, if one was searching hard enough, silently, imperceptibly, one might find a small, mouse-like girl wolfing down food, her ears perked for any sign of danger, or in fact any signs of life. Other than her, of course.

She had only realized now, once things had calmed down again, how hungry she was. She hadn't eaten since she had woken up, and that was... how long ago was that? She hadn't been keeping track, and how could she, really?

As soon as she was entrenched in the house, she opened her bag, took out an MRE and all but ripped it open, spilling its contents all over the floor. She picked up a pouch at random, not really caring what was inside. She wolfed down the chicken in short order and started on the crackers.

If someone were to walk in, they would have seen the small girl stuffing her face, surrounded by packets of food, with a water bottle right beside her, half-filled and uncapped.

Of course, if someone were to walk in, Cassandra would have bolted up and pulled her makeshift shiv out and pointed it right at them.

[Pippi]

((Kat Locke-Baldwin continued from Schrödinger's Kat in; The Prisonya's Dilemma))

She had planned to leave the ramshackle collection of buildings on the Western side of town immediately after picking up her new weapon, eager to get out of the aura of ruin and rot and head somewhere more civilised as soon as she could. But something had stopped her, the moment she’d left the house containing the clump of meat covered with a blazer, and she had stared at the house opposite for a while, before hurriedly crossing over to the front door.

It was human instinct to head for shelter in times of crisis. There would be no greater crisis for the Year 12 class of Saint Editha Academy than this, and in such a situation, she doubted many of her more timid or more resourceful classmates would care about the state of the buildings surrounding them, especially if they were running scared. So long as there were four walls, a ceiling, and a floor keeping them protected and hiding them away from everything, then they’d be happy.

And where people were likely to congregate, so too would bodies.

Kat turned the handle and pushed the front door open. The hinges creaked as she did so, but where she would have winced and frozen not five minutes ago, now she kept pushing, slipping into the house without a second thought. She had a weapon that hadn’t just been scooped up off of the floor, and it gave her a renewed sense of boldness.

Not that she was just going full moron and throwing caution to the wind, though. Her ears were pricked and alert as she carefully trod through the house, stepping onto a mattress lying in the doorway of the living room, pausing there for a moment to gage her balance on the thing. It took three steps before she was on the other side, feet gently tapping onto the bare wooden floorboards, a small cloud of dust floating up as she did.

It was the only sound Kat could hear in the house. Now that she wasn’t moving, everything was totally silent, one hand having pulled her shirt up to cover her mouth and nose, both to hide the stench and to cover the sound of her own breathing. She knew what the sound of her own footsteps sounded like. If any other noise intruded on that, she’d be ready. And if it was another pair of shoes, padding against the floorboards?

Let ‘em come. She had the “gun” for intimidation. The knife for when things got scrappy. Everything she’d worked towards was finally coming to fruition. She was ready.

[CondorTalon]

"W-Who's there?!" was the only thing that echoed through the house.

In the absence of all other sound, the creaking of the door and the tapping of footsteps that weren't hers came through loud and clear.

Too loud and too clear. Her hand rested on top the glass shard, tucked away but ready to be pulled out if need be.

Cassandra waited with bated breath. She had to be ready. Whoever was in the house with her was probably going to try and attack her. She wouldn't let them get the chance. Her eyes darted back and forth, but she didn't move. She didn't where the sound had come from, and she wasn't going to move out to be possibly ambushed.

Cassandra stared at the door, waiting for any signs of movement.

[Pippi]

Moron.

Kat rolled her eyes as she turned back the way she had come from, treading gingerly back onto the mattress and over to the other side. That made her life a hell of a lot easier, considering that whoever was in this house apparently wanted to throw their advantage away completely. Like, seriously. If you were entrenched inside a building, even one as mouldy and rancid as this, you had the element of surprise to someone who entered uninvited. You could get away with sneaking up to them, if they weren’t paying due attention.

But announcing your presence immediately flipped the script around, let them know that they weren’t alone, made sure that they would be on high alert, give them an idea of where you were in the building, so that they could either find you or avoid you, depending on what they were there for.

And it let them know just how petrified you were.

Kat’s fingers silently drummed against the knife’s handle before she gripped it even tighter, padding over towards the room opposite. The one thing that hadn’t gone according to the script was the fact that Kat hadn’t managed to catch the direction the voice had come from, but it wasn’t the end of the world. She was gonna be prepared for someone to leap out around every corner, for every room to contain a fellow classmate.

She stepped into the doorway, slowly scanning from her surroundings, arm ready to shoot up at the first sign of movement.

[CondorTalon]

Nothing.

Nothing happened.

And that was bad. There had been a possibility, however small, that the person in here with her wasn't trying to attack her. Maybe they were just looking to hide, to hunker down.

Like she was.

But then, they would have said something when she asked. And the fact that they didn't said a lot.

Cassandra's breathing sped up. She had to think of a way out of this. The room she was in didn't have any windows, because of course it didn't. She didn't want to poke her head out in the open, but now.

She stood up. Her rations were still scattered on the floor around her. She quickly scooped them up into her bag, except for the water bottle. She slowly capped it.

Her eyes looked to the door. Whoever it was could have been right outside. She had to think, but she also needed to be quick.

Through the doorway, a water bottle suddenly flew through the air, colliding with the wall just on the other side of the hallway.

[Pippi]

She spun on her heels instantly, slashing at the air with her knife as she heard the collision of something heavy against a solid object in the hallway behind her. Kat couldn’t tell what it was from sound alone. There was always the chance it was just something in this old, derelict pile of mould and rust falling down or falling apart, but somehow, she doubted it.

Dust hung in the air. The mattress she’d scrambled across lay motionless in the doorway opposite. Her hand clutching the knife quivered momentarily in front of her, then stayed still and vigilant. The image in the hallway was the same as it had been moments ago.

With one single new addition.

Kat moved towards it, as quietly as she could with old, creaking floorboards underfoot. She picked it up, turning it over in her hand. Aside from the streak of dust where it had slid along the floor after smacking the wall, it was brand new. Definitely not a remnant of the people who’d had to slum it out here before her class had been dropped in.

So. Wrong room, but she’d been getting warmer and warmer. Whoever it was in there obviously didn’t want to come out, but did want to let Kat know she was there. Maybe they were entrenched and fortified. Maybe they had a gun. She could have very easily just left them alone, slipped out the front door again, and head to better smelling pastures.

She stepped closer to the doorway, bottle in one hand, knife in the other. Whoever was in here with her was almost certainly armed. She’d spent too long fucking around in this town without finding anything of note. She wasn’t going to let this opportunity pass.

Kat took a deep breath, then hurled the water bottle back into the room. It had barely left her grip before she followed it in, rushing forwards. Hopefully she had surprise on her side.

[CondorTalon]

Cassandra was ready. When she threw the water bottle, she was hoping for some kind of reaction. In the best-case scenario, that reaction would be to leave. But that would just be putting up a false hope, wouldn't it?

For a while, there was nothing. For a few seconds, she had thought that maybe she'd imagined the whole thing.

Then it flew back in. Cassandra flinched, and that was enough for whoever was outside to rush in.

But Cassandra was ready. She'd barely registered the water bottle flying past, and already the glass shard was out, swinging in a wide arc to whoever it was that was coming in to meet her.

She howled.

[Pippi]

It took less than half a second for parity to return.

The girl in the room had no way of knowing when Kat was going to burst in, which was where the crux of her advantage lay, but there was also only one place she could burst in from. There was a single entrance to the room, unless she decided to sneak around to a window and enter that way, which would be time consuming, noisy, if she was forced to break it, and make her an absolute sitting duck as she clambered through it.

So the door was the only option. Kat was only going one way. And even though she knew there was someone in the room, their angles of attack were much, much more open.

The wild slash of the makeshift knife came just off to the side of Kat’s charge forward, and she had about enough time to spin her body to face it, arm instinctively raising to block the attack, before a white-hot line sliced through her, a cry of pain ripping from her lips and joining the cacophony of Cassandra’s roar.

She stumbled backwards, desperately carving out space between the two of them as she clattered into upturned and abandoned furniture, hissing sharply as blood dripped from her arm. It hurt like hell, the lacerations throbbing and stinging, each pulse of pain bad enough that she wanted to fall to her knees. The swing had cut through her upper arm and her forearm, and her uniform there was in tatters.

But the arm holding the knife was still in perfect working condition.

Kat snarled, glancing at her opponent. Small, light coloured hair. Probably coulda identified her in a quieter moment. She looked kinda like a mirror image, that someone had shattered.

She charged at her shattered self, launching a backhanded swing at them.

[CondorTalon]

Cassandra had half-expected the shard to miss. So when the shard cut through the other girl's arm, her breath caught.

Her mind flashed back to Daniel, and how he reacted when his arm had also been slashed, and then... and then...

Cassandra looked back up to see the other girl charging at her. Cassandra shrieked, stumbling backwards. The blade cut across her cheek, leaving a cut that stung immediately and painfully.

If she hadn't moved back, then...?

No... she had to survive this...!

She began to swing the shard around in a wild frenzy, hoping to catch something, anything. She wanted the other girl to leave. Just leave, and leave her alone.

Cassandra was tired, physically and mentally, of running. She needed to make the other girl leave. She swung wildly.

[Pippi]

The blade connected. She could feel it impact with the other girl’s face, could see the sharp red line it left behind, and the dripping red the knife collected. Something akin to a smile crept onto Kat’s face. Just had to do that a couple more times. Cut the girl, make her bleed, make her feel enough pain to back off and drop everything.

Then her eyes flashed over the knife in Cassandra’s hand, and the smile instantly dropped, because it wasn’t a knife, or anything she might have been assigned. The jagged, angular edges, the warped, miniature window grasped tightly in her hand could only be one thing, and it wasn’t anything Kat wanted.

She’d picked a fight with someone worse off than she’d been a day ago, and she wasn’t even fucking winning.

Kat scowled, and had enough time to spit out the moisture that had built up in her mouth before the other girl was upon her again, swinging wildly, desperately, hoping for contact rather than aiming, and there was nothing Kat could do to avoid it. She screamed in pain as the shard cut across her own face, just below her left eye, and criss-crossed the previous slash on her arm.

“Fuck off! Back the fuck off!”

She launched a kick at the girl, swung her knife, threw a punch, trying to stagger backwards, hand fumbling around her pocket as she fought Cassandra off.

[CondorTalon]

She barely registered the shard connecting with the other girl's face before her foot connected with Cassandra's stomach and she toppled backward. The follow-up strike of the knife caught her in the side, leaving a shallow, but rather long cut. Cassandra stepped back more, trying to put more distance between them.

Cassandra held the shard up again, breathing heavily. The same thought churned through her head.

Why couldn't everyone just leave her alone?

There wasn't any more room in her head for any other thoughts.

She stared down the other girl, daring her to do anything else.

She was ready to lunge forward again if need be. She'd keep going until everyone just LET HER BE.

[Pippi]

Kat breathed heavily, grimacing as she faced Cassandra, letting out a grunt of pain as the cuts across her body pulsed and stung. She could hear blood dripping from her arm and onto the floor, and could feel it trickling down her face. She tasted copper as it slid past the corner of her mouth, and she scowled, wiping the trail of blood away and locking eyes with the other girl.

She was just a wild, cornered animal. That was all she was. Only a threat if she was made to be a threat. It was the job of those killers with hatchets and spears and guns to take these animals down. And it was those killers that Kat needed to be looking for.

Someone who solely had the intention to kill would find this girl, sooner or later. Maybe they’d get hurt in their struggle to murder her. Maybe they’d get killed too. It was no skin off of Kat’s nose. That’s what they deserved, intentionally trying to kill. Maybe she’d come back here, after the next announcements. See if there was anything left behind for her to collect.

Kat’s hand finally found its way into her pocket, and she pulled out the fake gun, aiming it at Cassandra, starting to move sideways, closer to the doorway again.

“Don’t… move…”

She kept the gun trained on the other girl as she slipped out the door, then, as soon as she lost sight of her, turned tail and ran, kicking up dust as her feet thudded against the wooden floor and out into the street.

She’d wasted time again. Picked a fight she didn’t need to, because she hadn’t been planning on fighting at all until she got to the very end of this bullshit. She’d been hurt, and now she needed to patch herself up, and that was more time wasted when she could be searching for and taking weapons.

She scowled again, then shook her head as she continued running. Whatever. The killers would kill, and eventually they’d kill each other. She’d find a way to slip in afterwards and clean up their mess, and make sure nobody had more of an advantage than they deserved. She’d done it once, she’d do it again.

C’est la fucking vie.

((Kat Locke-Baldwin continued in P - I - P - E - S))

[CondorTalon]

Cassandra was expecting the fight to continue. It would be expected, after all. She was a killer, and therefore, she was a target. She was going to be attacked, and she wasn't going to stop being attacked. It'd be the only way to go.

But Cassandra was surprised when the other girl just... left. Oh, sure, she'd pulled a gun on her. Cassandra's heart skipped a beat. Or two. She'd expected to die right then.

But she was still alive.

Alive and alone.

She... she managed to fight her off.

A smile appeared on her face. She'd won.

She'd won!

She moved back to her spot. She was still hungry. But she'd managed to fight someone off. She'd managed to beat.

It was...

She could...

She could do it again. There couldn't be that many people left.

She could...

She could make it.

((Cassandra Argent continued in This bitch empty! YEET!!!))