Play Dead

[Frozen Smoke]

At least the weather was nice.

The road he was lying on was hot enough that it made the backs of his hands tingle uncomfortably, though not enough to move them as he stared up at the blue, cloudless sky. He'd heard a few distant curses earlier, but that hadn't amounted to anything.

Jacob had always imagined he'd die in the rain.

[Applesintime]

((S009: Stephen Sanders: START))

Stephen, at the time, had derided the idea of a visit to a potato farm. He hadn't expressed it, actually, but the idea was still firmly lodged in his head. Sure, reading about how some Gifts could work with plants and growing and all of that was fascinating. But at the same time, it was a potato farm. It got him out of class for a day, though, and a potato farm was relatively safe. As long as he didn't trip and break his ankle.

Right now, though, Stephen would have infinitely preferred to be at the boring potato farm, learning about how potatoes are grown, rather than lying on the side of a road in... wherever the hell they were right now, having witnessed three more deaths than any high school student should. He was also in a sleeping bag. This was certainly one way to wake up, especially because it was like an oven inside this bag. Did they really have to do this? He had to extract himself carefully; there probably wasn't that much risk of breaking something, but Stephen wasn't gonna take that risk.

Once he was out, he unsteadily pushed himself up and looked around. Two things immediately presented themselves to him; a duffel bag a few feet away from him, and a shape lying on the road. Stephen squinted, and took a few steps closer. It was a person, he thought, someone with a chameleon Gift? They were the same colour as the road.

"Hey! Hey, dude, you alright?" Stephen went for the duffel bag first, and then approached the road guy cautiously. Hopefully he wasn't open to the idea of uh, murdering each other. Seriously, what the fuck was up with that?

[Frozen Smoke]

"No."

His tone was as flat as he was, eyes still firmly glued to the sky. What else was he supposed to say?

'Oh, no I turn grey when I'm overwhelmed with positive emotions. This is all just so exciting and uplifting!'

Jacob sighed. That wasn't fair on the voice.

"You?"

[The Honeless Beard]

Green eyes had snapped open forty five minutes ago and twenty eight tail lashes ago, with the thought of for fuck's sakes.

Firstly, the dude with the tiger mask was an absolute poser. Never had Kincaid ever felt so much more superior to someone than staring at a person with a rubber replica of his own face. Well, kinda. Jungle cats weren't house cats, et cetera.

Secondly, nobody was going to take this shit seriously, right? That wasn't - nobody was actually going to kill each other. That was stupid. He didn't exactly have the highest regard for his classmates, but nobody was actually batshit fucking insane enough to roll on up and start ganking their fellow friends and colleagues over the word of an owl that was in love with the phrase "you will die."

The whole thing had this air of gravitas that wasn't deserved. Kincaid wanted to chuckle. Ha-ha-ha. It didn't help that the gas or whatever they'd pumped them with had filled his eyes and nose with liquid, left it to run freely, snot and tears dripping down his fur and mixing with his whiskers.

Nobody was going to take this seriously.

He was sure of it.

Kincaid had taken his keds off immediately and threw them into the forest flanking the road he walked on. He ran faster without shoes. Not that he'd need to - he wouldn't need to run, because nobody was actually going to kill each other. That would be fucking ridiculous. Instead they were all just gonna sit tight, wait for rescue, or eat their food and get picked up from this zany college experiment gone wrong.

He froze when he saw a figure lying in the road, another figure standing over them. Movements hesitant, he crept more than walked, trying to keep himself to both of the figures' blind sides, ears flat, hood pulled up and over his face. He needed to disguise himself as much as possible, in case anyone from the rock fight was here. If anyone would take this thing at face value, it'd be those psychopaths.

Getting closer, he saw that Steven was clearly talking to the prone figure, and Kincaid shoved his hands into his pockets, his tail twitching as he walked a little faster, buoyed at the thought of a familiar face.

"Hey, uh-" he trailed off. Fuck. Were he and Steven even on name basis?

"-buddy."

That'll work.

[Pippi]

There was a roadblock up ahead.

((Mercedes Guenther continued from T-Minus))

It wasn’t a particularly large roadblock, nor did it demand much effort or energy to breach. It was just two - no, three, she recognised the sleeping bag lying on the road from the smouldering corpse of her own - people standing around in presumable conversation, not even spanning the width of the whole road. What it was, though, was directly in her way, so long as she wanted to keep following the road into the compound. Sure, she could make a wide berth around the congregation if she really wanted to, and she knew that getting somewhere sheltered had to be her number one priority right now.

But she kept on walking down the path, towards the group, narrowing her eyes and raising her hand above her eyeline to try and sort out who she was headed towards. There was no sign of a floating orb in the vicinity, nobody wearing a telltale pair of thick-soled boots or gentle cloud of lavender perfume. Disappointing, but not entirely unexpected that they wouldn’t be among the first people she ran into. She’d find them. Hook or by crook, she would find them.

Besides, talking to these three would still be able to help her out. Maybe even get some of her thoughts sorted before she even made it inside.

She was within spitting distance of the group now, able to figure out who she was about to talk to via their faces - or, in one case, through another feature entirely. Stephen was a friendly guy who Mercedes had shared a number of friendly exchanges with, and Jacob - whose dull grey skin tone briefly gave her a jolt of excitement before it was swiftly crushed again - was an absolute sweetheart, someone that Mercy had tried her damnedest to divert bullies and assholes away from.

And then there was Kincaid.

His hood was up, his head was down, but there wasn’t anything that could disguise his swishing slightly puffed-up tail. He wasn’t even close to making the list of people Mercedes wanted to see right now, and the only saving grace was that neither she nor anybody else from school was on his. He was standoffish, he was cold, and for someone that ran a Twitch channel, he seemed to despise even being caught in the spotlight.

He was also, lest she somehow forget, one of the main instigators of the Rockfight at the O.K. Quarry. The scars from that - literal on top of metaphorical - still stung to this very day.

“Hey.”

She raised her hand in greeting as she came to a halt, remembering a fraction of a second too late that her gloves were in a tattered heap a few yards back down the road. She closed her hand into a fist, lowering her arm and folding them both across her body, too late to hide the jagged, flame-licked void on her palm, the wound that would never close, that would always leave rings of ash and soot wherever her fingers traced.

Mercedes kept her vision locked on Kincaid, unwavering.

[Brackie]

((Kennedy Jackson continued from You Will Not Take My Heart Alive))

She had to see for herself.

Being dropped in a building was one thing - anyone could get a building. Buildings were everywhere, especially in America. But it was a completely different thing to have an entire compound, and the desert surrounding it. So she needed to make sure, for herself, that the place she just spent the last however long snacking on a picture of for ink? That it was real. And the best way to do that, in Kennedy's book, was to take that road all the way to where her still-existing map said was the border.

She wasn't hoping it wasn't real or anything. She just needed to make sure. 100%. For sure. That it was real.

But that meant going outside, and however mildly humid it was inside that Compound, it was five times as hot outside. The weather itself wasn't hot, but the sun bearing down on her wasn't doing her any favours with her wardrobe. She'd taken one step outside before immediately retreating back to the shadows, ripping her beanie off to put in her bag, and similarly ripping her hoodie off. She still had Moose's gunk on it where she wiped her hand, she didn't want to deep-fry herself. However, rather than putting the hoodie in her bag with her beanie, she held it above her head, creating a small ring of shade above herself. It wasn't much, but she was pale. She was caucasian. She was wearing jeans. She needed to make walking across a hot desert on a burning road the least arduous thing possible.

She couldn't really do anything about her jeans, though. The thought occured to her she could distress them, cut vents in them, but she didn't have a knife. And she knew if she tried to do it with her own two hands, she'd just screw it up, like she did everything she tried to do.

So rather than working forcefully, with purpose, Kennedy was reduced to walking slowly, as though she was having a stroll. It was slow, but at least her legs weren't being overworked and sweating and swelling and expanding and ruining her life from the inside. She walked out of the shadows of the building. She walked out of the carpark. She walked past the guardhouse. And she kept walking - the desert road was long, and she was there, looping her thoughts, just to make sure she kept going. Keep going, Kennedy.

Get to that cactus. Get to the cactus. Keep going, and get to the cactus. You've made it to the cactus.
Now get to that brush. Get to that brush. Keep going, and get to the brush. You've made it to the brush.
Now get to the hill. Get to the hill. Keep going, and get to the hill. You've made it to the top of the hill.
Get to the peop-

Kennedy hadn't stopped moving, but her thoughts stopped going circular when she saw other people. She didn't recognize them, but she kept going. Eventually, she got within a distance that she could recognize that they were people with faces, and then she recognized all of them. Stephen Sanders she shared a history class with, and not much else. Kincaid Rawlins, who she didn't think she shared any classes with but knew anyway because his gift meant he was like a cat. And Jacob Rowe, who had a fight with Jenelle that one time and that was the most interaction Kennedy had ever had with him because he was a junior and she was a senior. He was laying on the road, having turned into the colour of the road, and she wondered how hot it was down there. The road they were all standing on, or standing near, was taking the full brunt of the sun right now. And there was Mercy Gunther, someone she'd never spoken to but she knew was a lesbo who had giant holes in her hands that could shoot lasers.

But they weren't her problem right now. Her problem was this place, and her solution, in a manner of speaking, was seeing the boundaries. They could be her problem if they were dangerous, but she hoped it wouldn't come to that. Kincaid and Mercy both had gifts which could kill her, if she was keeping a mental tally, but everyone just seemed to be standing around. If she'd just wandered into a group of murderers planning out their next kill, then that could be a problem for her and her alone. But everyone seemed just as awkward and social as her, which was a nice change of pace, considering the situation.

As she got within speaking distance, she temporarily turned her gaze from the end of the road to the four of them, even if she hadn't stopped walking.

"Hey."

She turned her gaze back to the end of the road, still walking.

[Frozen Smoke]

A few other voices joined the chorus around him, but Jacob turned his head sideways, away from them. He could hear a different noise, a quiet tacktacktack of frantic pace, like the scuttling of crabs sped up. His brow furrowed as he tried to place it.

His jaw hung loose for a moment as he finally saw it. A river of insects running by the side of the road, flies hovering just above the sand, whilst beetles, scorpions and spiders marched underneath. Jacob rolled over onto his opposite side, eyes wide as he looked back at his newfound companions.

Then he felt the pinpricks of footprints across his back.
"Jesus FU-cking Christ!"

Jacob's feet caught in the sleeping bag as he instinctively jumped upright, leaving him to fall awkwardly forwards to his knees, as he threw his jacket off his shoulders and desperately craned an arm down the back of his shirt. His other arm joined from underneath a moment later, before withdrawing with it's prize - Which he hurled to the ground - a translucent tan coloured scorpion.

[Wham Yubeesling]

“Fly, little maggot, fly as you please~
“Join our swarm, and be one with me~”

[DerArknight]

((Gary Greer-Wheatly continued from It's Just A Single Vice))

Before Gary's eyes, the swarm grew.

Several more ant colonies had joined the caravan alongside dozens of different species, some unknown to Gary. Under normal circumstances, many of them would be fighting each other on sight, but now they were marching together in one direction.

And that was just the ground.

Despite it being day, Gary found himself more and more in shadows. Countless flying insects were gathered into a massive cloud that got bigger by the second. All facing a specific direction.

Somewhere before him, Gary could see the end, the front of the march. He couldn't make out anything, but he was sure it was a person leading them all.

The whole parade was so bizarre that it took his full attention. Gary didn't see that to his right were a bunch of his classmates. Gary didn't see that to his left, the road would lead him directly to the building he had originally planned to visit.

Instead, he quickly left the road and followed the swarm.

((Gary Greer-Wheatly continued in would))

[The Honeless Beard]

After Kincaid closed his idiot mouth, Mega-Man Mercedes herself wandered up the road and flashed her killer palms at him, making him freeze, fur shackling and tail twitching in annoyance. The two stood off for a moment, Kincaid half-wondering if a tumbleweed was going to bounce gaily past them.

Instead, Kennedy bounced gaily past them, tossing in their third hey in as many minutes. Now they had enough feed to last through winter.

Before Kincaid could re-open his fucking gob and start digging with the shovel he carried at all times, Jacob did a twitchy, squirmy thing, throwing a scorpion out of his bag and turning a ghost white. A croaky singing came from his left, and he turned to see a plague of locusts gathering, moving. Behind it, like a toy soldier, followed Gary.

"Okay, alright," Kincaid said, rubbing one clawed hand at his temple, "that's enough for today. Y'all can knock me back out."

His words were directed to the sky.

[Applesintime]

In the blink of an eye, a few more of Stephen's classmates had shown up. Kincaid Rawlins, the guy with the catboy Gift, was one of them. Stephen had always been curious, but Kincaid had never seemed like the kind of person who liked his Gift very much, and so the bulk of their social interaction was sharing a class. There was Mercedes Guenther as well, with laser hands. It was like something from a pre-Emergence comic. Kennedy Jackson ate ink, or paper, or had some Gift related to those two things. Stephen only knew this because he had seen her in history class eating an essay that a pen had leaked on.

Stephen opened his mouth. Maybe they could all cooperate. Getting out of here couldn't be the hardest thing in the world, not if they put their Gifts together. There were obviously more people here, and while he didn't know the specifics of every classmate's Gift, together they could come up with a way of getting these collars off and finding help. But it turns out, when there's a giant convoy of ants and scorpions and bugs Stephen didn't even know lived in the desert suddenly appearing and someone's shouting and screaming because there's a scorpion coming his way, you tend to get a little sidetracked.

"What the fuck?" There was someone following after the swarm; Stephen didn't know quite who they were, and there might have been someone leading the bugs? Either way, he wasn't going anywhere near that swarm. If someone wanted to follow the Pied Piper, that was their choice. Moving as quickly as he dared towards Jacob, keeping his footing steady and darting between ants so he didn't slip and break his hip or something equally painful, he offered the pale boy a hand. "Hey, uh, we should get up. I don't know if more of the bugs are coming or why they're doing that but it might not be a bad idea to get out of here, find more people." Safety in numbers. More people, more Gifts, a better chance of getting out of here.

[Brackie]

Nobody acknowledged she was there.

Same as it always was.

Kennedy kept her eyes on the road, and kept walking.

((Kennedy Jackson continued elsewhere))

[Pippi]

Mercedes barely had enough time to raise her arm for a curled-hand greeting before Kennedy was on the other side of the roadblock, walking down the road and disappearing into the desert. Mercedes watched her back, her arm slowly lowering once again to cross against her chest.

She didn’t move to stop the other girl, didn’t speak up to try and call her back, or anything of the sort. Kennedy was the arbiter of her own decisions; it hadn’t looked like she’d been panicking or sounded like she’d been delusional, after all. Perhaps she thought she would find answers or the beginnings of a plan deeper into the desert, and if that was the case, then Mercy had even less reason to drag her back to the roadblock. The weather was relatively mild, for those without an eternal engine blazing away inside of them, and so their paths would take them in opposite directions for now.

And Mercy felt as though she would be able to gain the answers she needed for her own journey right here. Once they’d dealt with their newest visitors, of course.

She jumped a foot back as Jacob tossed a dazed-looking scorpion onto the ground, then another foot as the first wave of the swarm descended upon them, both actions she felt rather justified in taking. She positioned her feet carefully, gingerly lowering her heels to make sure she didn’t crush a stray spider or beetle as she regained her balance. It was difficult not to let the innate sense of revulsion at the sound of hundreds of beating wings wrest control of her body, but she forced herself to stay rooted and remain calm. Biblical though their current situation seemed, there was a much more innocuous reason for the horde surrounding them. There was only one person she could think of that would have, or could have, caused it.

“Hey, hey, it’s okay. I don’t think we need to be so hasty,” Mercedes said, unfolding her arms and holding them out in a gesture of peace. Her voice was raised, just to be heard above the chittering ambience, but it maintained its usual, measured, calming tone, with only a hint of tremulation at the sensation of creepy-crawlies brushing against bare skin.

“I think it’s okay. That’s Isabella’s doing. She’s harmless.”

She was certainly weird, Mercy couldn’t deny that. It was always a little disconcerting, talking to her and seeing a spider or wasp crawl out of her unwashed mass of hair. But she was someone who quite literally would never harm a fly, and never had a bad word to say about anyone, and thus was someone who Mercy spent a lot of time fiercely deflecting bullies and assholes away from. Isabella seemed to genuinely love the insects that congregated around her, and so if she wanted to spend time with as many of them as she could to calm her nerves, well, once again, Mercedes wasn’t going to stop her.

Her eyes did narrow at the sight of Gary, however, as he followed after the swarm, acting for all the world as though he’d also fallen under Isabella’s particular spell. Last Mercedes checked, his Gift hadn’t granted him mandibles, a carapace, or the tribulations of Gregor Samsa. He hadn’t been a particularly troublesome classmate back at school, nor could she describe him as a bully in anyway; maybe Isabella had asked him to follow after her for whatever reason.

Still though. If it transpired that something had happened in the depths of the desert between them, with Gary as the instigator, then you could be damned sure that Mercedes would see to it that justice would be enacted.

“The bugs are just going to follow after her, see?” she continued, mostly directing her words towards Jacob and Stephen, her eyes still flicking over to glance at Kincaid every couple of seconds. “And she’s already long gone. They’re not going to hurt you. So just… make sure you can all stand, and make sure you can all breathe, and just take a big deep breath, in and out. Doesn’t matter how long it takes you to make one, just… breathe…”

She had questions burning a hole in her tongue, and a Gift burning away at her skin, but she could spare, perhaps, a couple of minutes longer.

[Frozen Smoke]

Jacob's breathing slowed, and his skin paled. White irises darted from new face to new face, finally putting names to the voices he had been only distantly aware of. Mercedes was doing her best to try and calm him down, whilst Stephen and Kincaid looked annoyed. It felt like they were all looking at him, even as Kincaid looked to the sky for answers, and Kennedy continued walking past them.

"Sorry." he mumbled as he looked away, gripping Stephen's offered hand and pulling himself back upright, before leaning forwards and brushing the sand and dust off his trousers. "I just..." he began, too quickly, the collar around his neck suddenly feeling much too tight. Jacob didn't exactly have an excuse to offer.

He took that big breath in, and held it.
And let it out.

[EMPeace]

((Sydney Stone continued from Too afraid to live; too afraid to die))

Sydney had been meandering a ways off from the road in an attempt to minimize contact with anyone else. She had made a point to stay on whichever side of the road had the high ground at the time, so that she could easily run out of sight from anyone who may have spotted her. She finished the last sip of one of her water bottles as she hiked along. How long had she been here? There was no way she could make these supplies last for long. Why was she even bothering to hydrate herself if she had no plans to survive? She dismissed this line of thought and figured that she may as well die in relative comfort.

Aside from the occasional profane ramblings she would mutter to herself, she had been moving silently, until she happened to notice one of the wireless cameras that the masked assholes had mentioned, attached to a tree. She found herself staring directly into it with a spiteful glare. It was nailed into the tree a short way up the trunk. She wondered which of the ringleaders of this shitshow were watching right now, and before she could second-guess herself, she was digging her claws into the tree's bark and climbing up to level her face with the camera, before gripping it in one of her hands and violently yanking it loose.

She clenched her fist around the small device, completely overcome by the impotent rage, and let out a savage roar while pounding it against the tree.
"FUCKING SCUMBAG PIECES OF SHIT!!"

She tossed what remained of the camera to the ground once she was done with it, panting heavily. She took a brief moment to find relief in that she had at least cost these pieces of human refuse a little bit of extra money, before the realization struck her in the heart like a dagger that her collar could detonate any second now since she'd just damaged their property. If she costs them more than they think they'll get out of this, she's dead.

Wait, why was she so scared of that if it was already her plan?
Right, because she's a coward.

Sydney hopped back down from the tree, and started running to give herself a bit of a head start on anyone who may have been headed towards the noise she had just made. She kept running for longer than she could keep track of, but eventually got careless, so she swept herself off her own feet, and quickly slid down the incline back towards the road. She made multiple attempts to stop herself, but only kicked up more sand as she let out increasingly vulgar grunts of frustration. By the time she stopped sliding down the hill, she was practically on the road. She froze up for several seconds to listen, desperately hoping no one had heard, or even worse, seen what just happened. She then haltingly turned her head towards the road, an expression of equal parts fear and frustration on her face as she realized she'd slipped right into a group of her opponents, who were just a ways up the road from her. She knew none of their names, as most of the people she was familiar with had graduated without her last year. She was unsure at the moment if any of them actually noticed, as they seemed to be busy speaking to one another. Instead of speaking or moving, she simply stared at the lot of them, wide-eyed, scrutinizing their every move, attempting to determine whether or not she needed to run away right now. They didn't seem hostile, but she did not quite feel like taking any chances whilst outnumbered against people she didn't know.