Something Something Movie Reference

[CondorTalon]

"...Thanks."

Once again, one word was all that needed to be said.

Claire asked Corey if there were any last requests. Anything he wanted to say.

"Um..." his mind, clouded with emotions and scrambled with fractured thoughts, paused as he struggled to come up with something.

"Find Gray and Sean, tell them I'm sorry for running. It was... stupid. Of me. If you find... Rachael, or, Tim, or Michael... the deaf one... tell them I'm sorry too."

He closed his eyes.

"And... don't cry for me..." he said. He could tell. He didn't want her to cry.

Everything fell silent for a long time. All Corey could hear was breathing. His breathing. Her breathing. Maybe somewhere in the distance he could slightly make out Zubin's presence.

He was getting tired.

"Um... I guess I need some kind of last words...? Something to remember me by?" he said. Maybe it was a joke. Maybe he was trying to ease the tension.

"...Shit. I got nothing."

And that was that.

Not long afterwards, Corey slipped into a coma. While not technically dead, there was nothing for him left to do. Nothing left that he could do. Over the next few hours, as his body was slowly overcome by sepsis, Corey's brain slowly shut down.

And that was that.

B048 - Corey Esposito: DECEASED

[Laurels]

((Timeskipping, order skipping, and GMing approved))

"Okay. I can do that," Claire said, holding Corey tighter.

Gray and Sean she could look for. The freighter was a place to start, then she could search the nearby areas. The other three surprised her. Rachael Langdon, Tim Abrams, and Michael Mitchellson were people she didn't expect Corey to know. They were all Book Club kids. He must have been with them earlier in the week and lost them at some point. Claire made note of each person. None of them were on the last announcements, so she still had a chance to find them alive.

"Don't worry, I won't cry," she said.

Claire remembered that she made that declaration once before, when Kyle was killed by Hansel. God, she had almost forgotten about Kyle. So much had happened since then, but at the same time, not much either. She had to abandon him to save her own skin. Since then, she had worn the vest that was supposed to have protected him and eaten the food that was in his bag. It was terrible to think of what had befallen the kid she hardly knew before this game, and even worse to think that she might have abused their companionship. It was terrible to lose friends.

Claire had made a promise to Corey, but even she couldn't prevent a few tears from falling down her cheeks. She was glad he couldn't see her face. Corey tried to have some final words, but couldn't think of anything profound. Claire let out a small chuckle at his choice of words. That was the Corey she'd remember.

Corey's body fell limp. She loosened her grip and pulled him away so she could look at his face. He was still breathing, but it looked like he had passed out.

"Alright, buddy," she said to Corey. "You rest, and then we'll look for those guys."

Claire laid Corey down on the cave floor. She walked back over to where she dropped her bag and picked it up, along with her flashlight. She walked back to Corey and lifted his body up, putting the bag under his head so he could have a pillow on the hard floor. She held the flashlight in her hands and stood vigil over her friend.

She didn't acknowledge Zubin. There wasn't any need to.

---

Claire had dozed off while watching over Corey. She gasped when she woke up. How could she fall asleep like that? True, she didn't get much sleep the previous night, or for much of the week at that, but Corey needed her to look over her.

"Corey?" she said to her friend.

Claire looked at Corey. His chest wasn't rising. Claire's eyes widened. She quickly held her face close to his mouth. She couldn't feel his breath on her cheek. She then moved her head and put it on his chest. There was no heartbeat. She slowly lifted her head up, her head hanging low.

"He's dead," she said aloud.

Claire looked back. Zubin was still in the cave. She glanced at him, then back at Corey. She looked over his body. He really was dead. She was looking at the corpse of one of her best friends from school. She looked up at the entrance to the cave. It was probably mid to late afternoon now. She knew what she should do, and she had to hurry before the sun set.

She tucked the flashlight into her denim jacket pocket, then moved over to Corey. She lifted his head, pulling her bag out from under him. She held him up as she threw the strap of her bag over one shoulder. She then put her arms under Corey's armpits and grabbed his chest. She held on tight as she started moving backwards, pulling Corey out of the cave.

A few years ago, Claire had seen a movie called The Usual Suspects. In the movie, the main characters, a gang of criminals, discover one of their allies dead on a beach and bury him in order to hide the crime. It was respect to an ally, and it was something Claire could do for her friend. She wouldn't be able to do it for all of her friends, but she could at least give this one a funeral.

"And I thought I was done burying bodies," she muttered to herself.

Claire managed to drag Corey outside the cave and onto the sandy beach. She laid him carefully on the ground, then got on her knees. She began to dig her hands into the sand, shoving it to the side. She began to grunt as she dug harder into the ground. The sand started to get under her long fingernails as she tossed it to the side. She ignored it and kept digging. It was a lot harder than before. She lost the shovel back at the clubhouse, and her hands still somewhat hurt from all the digging she did a few days ago. Claire grunted as she tried to dig deeper into the ground.

Claire continued to move sand out of the rough hole she was trying to dig. If things went the way she hoped, this would be the last grave she'd ever dig. There was a chance she could never honor Corey's request, so she could at least do something for him, no matter how difficult it was.

[decoy73]

Zubin had nothing to say. It wasn't that complicated on why. He had nothing to say, serious or otherwise, that would make anyone feel better. Hell, anything he was even thinking of saying would have probably given Claire full license to punch him in the face at least. So Zubin just shut his mouth and let Claire and Corey have their moment for however long they needed.

Several hours later, Zubin saw Claire wake up and check on Corey.

"He's dead." Zubin was ... he was finding it hard to feel anything. The announcements that had permeated the island for the past week made constant death an almost immutable fact, like the blood in his veins. Claire was still in that stage of being affected by it, at least in part due to the fact that they were friends going in. This was confirmed by Claire dragging Corey's body to the beach, where she started to dig a hole. Zubin had one chance to pull this off, otherwise, his escape plan was headed to the scrap heap.

"Uh, Claire?" Zubin nervously walked up to her. "I'm sorry about Corey. Burials aren't really my style, but if you want, I can say some last words or something. I have some ideas down that you can add to." Zubin held out his notepad which held the same message he had shown Mara, with one small edit.

Whatever plan I say is a decoy to throw off terrorists. Collars are the key to this game. Best plan is to figure out how collars work and disarm explosives only. Must find out way to prevent detection by cameras. Makeshift shelter? Bedsheets? Desk?

Under that original message, Zubin had written in capital letters clear enough for him to see without his glasses:

BECAUSE COREY IS YOUR FRIEND, WHETHER OR NOT WE TRY TO TAKE HIS COLLAR OFF IS COMPLETELY UP TO YOU. IF YOU APPROVE, WE GO FOR IT. IF NOT, WE LOOK FOR ANOTHER CORPSE, NO QUESTIONS ASKED.

[Laurels]

((GMing approved))

Claire continued to move the sand out of the way. She could feel sweat forming on her brow. Her hands were starting to sweat as well, getting sand stuck on them. They were starting to itch, but she didn't stop digging. She needed to get a decently sized hole to bury Corey in, one that hopefully wouldn't be exposed by the tide or be shallow enough for seagulls to feast upon. The image of seagulls or carrion birds picking at her friend's body was pretty hard to think about, so she kept going.

Zubin walked up and started talking to her. She didn't really have the attention to devote to what he was saying, so she kept digging deeper into the hole. Zubin said he had some words to say to Corey and wanted to give her ideas. He handed her a notepad, which she took. She adjusted her glasses and looked at the paper before her. It looked a bit damp, or at least had gotten wet some time ago, but she was able to read what he wrote down.

Claire slowly stood onto her feet as she read the contents of the notepad. It appeared that the orgy thing was a lie. A stupid lie, but a lie at least. This was Zubin's real plan to escape the island, but the addendum he had was what clearly caught her attention. She grit her teeth as she read the large print, then looked over at Zubin.

Claire quickly raised the notepad in the air and swung it down, whacking Zubin over the head with the pad of paper.

"Are you for fucking real?" she shouted at him.

"You're seriously asking me if I'd be okay with cutting my friend's head off? What do you think my answer is going to be? 'Sure, go ahead and desecrate my friend's body when he's not even cold yet'? Is empathy just a foreign concept to you?"

Claire held the notepad up to Zubin, pointing at the words on the paper.

"And really? This is your ingenious plan? Something that's already killed, what, ten or more kids? I'm pretty sure they killed someone for trying to take a collar off a dead body recently. Seven days here and that's all you got? I thought you studied this game. Has something like this never happened in a previous game? Did you really think they wouldn't take precautions in case someone tried this?"

Claire tossed the notepad on the ground.

"Are you really that fucking stupid?" she shouted at his face.

Claire didn't care that she was saying all of this out loud. Zubin was being really small minded right now, and she wasn't going to have it. She got back on her knees and continued to push the sand out of the hole. She groaned and grumbled as she continued to dig. At least doing this would bear more fruit than what Zubin had in mind.

[decoy73]

The idea hadn't gone over very well with Claire, if her words and actions were anything to go by. As he picked up his hat and put it back on his head, he mulled over the questions he had been asked. "Are you serious?" "Where is your sense of shame?" and "Are you stupid?" filtered into and echoed through his head. After about thirty seconds, he started speaking.

"Okay, let's be honest. Do you have any better ideas? I ask because yes, on my own, that is my best idea. Given what we have, it's honestly the best I can do. The only other thing I could have done was take a collar off a living student, and I don't think that would have really gone over well with whomever we were removing he collar from. So yes, I mean it, and I welcome any ideas that can be somewhat safely pilled off with no electronic equipment." He breathed in and out. Just stay calm.

"And as for my empathy? It's on fucking life support. Hell, me asking you about Corey? That was me being empathetic. I could have just snapped his neck and gone for it, but I asked you, because let's be honest, wouldn't it have come up anyway? I mean, look at us! We've been on Death Island for a week, half of our class is dead, with it going up to three-quarters in a couple days, and you expect me to have the same level of empathy as I did going in? I watched a guy get shot to death, and then saw Katarina shoot ..." He searched his head for the name. "Chase. I can't speak for you, of course, but look at us! We're both rational, non-psychos who still actually, in some way, are thinking about people and have minimal physical injuries. That easily puts us in the top ten percent of people in the game right now. We're all fucking deluded right now."

Zubin plopped onto the ground, putting his hands on his knees. He was starting to lose his sense of coherency. Maybe everything else would stay. Maybe.

[Laurels]

Claire continued to push sand away as Zubin went into his spiel. He asked her if she had any better ideas to escape than he did. Then he had to go and try to defend his actions as being empathetic. Claire rolled her eyes as he spoke. She couldn't believe that was his idea of empathy. Sure, she could agree that it was hard to have any empathy after seven days on Shithole Island, but she was at least trying to be respectful to those she could be respectful to.

Claire stopped digging and turned to Zubin, who was now sitting on the ground.

"Zubin, the empathetic thing would to have been to assess the situation before speaking. Perhaps consider that the person you are talking to might not want you to chop the head off her friend so you can play Dr. Tenma with his collar. If you were really empathetic, you should have known to just say nothing at all."

"I'm sorry you had issues in this game. I don't think anyone left has not had a run-in with a psycho at this point. I mean, I ran into the discount Rhinestone Cowboy and he shot a person in front of me, took me hostage, then whacked me over the head with his gun."

Claire pointed to the bandage on her head.

"I've had my share of issues, and I have no sympathy to the people willingly playing along, but I know to at least try to remain empathetic to those who deserve it. No, I probably shouldn't have whacked you over the head with that notepad, but you haven't earned my empathy yet."

Claire turned back to the makeshift grave and started tossing small bits of sand out.

"Oh, and to answer your question, no, I don't have any better ideas for how to escape. But then again, I'm not trying to escape. I'm undernourished, have very few tools at my disposal, no mechanical or engineering skills, and I doubt I can fool the people behind this game who have probably had four years to think of every possible scenario that our class might come up with to escape."

"At the same time, I highly doubt you have the skills to break this game. I mean, I read an article about the kids who escaped last time, and it sounds like they had some supergeniuses at their school. How do you expect to take apart technology you've never seen before and hope to figure out how it works anyways?"

[decoy73]

And there was the question. "How do you expect to take apart technology you've never seen before and hope to figure out how it works anyways?"

"I ... I don't. Not like that, anyways." Zubin snapped his fingers for effect. "But, why not go for it? Go down like a ... go down swinging at least. Yeah, I may not end this forever. The last escape didn't. But it is a giant 'fuck you' to a bunch of people who deserve it. In the unlikely event we pulled it off, at least the two of us would have a chance to walk home." He sighed.

"I just figured that it was worth a shot."

[Laurels]

Claire continued to push sand out of the hole. It was getting a bit deep now, probably a few more minutes and she's be able to bury Corey and go find the guys. Zubin's response to her last question confused her. He wanted to get a collar off a dead body, but he wasn't planning to take it apart and figure out how it worked? She didn't know what he was trying to do now. His claims that he was trying to do something made up for it, since that had been what she had done in her week here.

"I understand your desire to do something while your alive," she said. "It's just hard to keep it going. Hell, I was going to try and bury any corpse I found, and all that did was push me towards Hansel and get my ally killed."

Claire looked at the hole in the ground.

"Corey's probably the last one I'm going to bury. I doubt I'll get a chance to do anything like this again."

Claire continued to push more sand out of the way and continued to talk to Zubin.

"Do whatever you think is right. I won't stop you. Just be prepared for the consequences of your actions. Your plan is unstable, but if you think it can work, then it's up to you to go through with it."

[decoy73]

Okay, so Claire was understanding, at the least. Of course, he didn't even know if he could pull the plan off at this point. He just looked around.

Eh, I've got nothing better to do.

He leaned forward and started expanding the hole as best he could with his hands. All the while, he was going through the past week and his plans, given that Mara and now Claire had quite possibly blown his secret. That combined with the fact that there was a rapidly lowering number of students (sixty-something by last count), meant that getting a group together was going to get harder by the minute. Of course, escape was the only way he could make a "clean" exit, but still.

Zubin hated reality sometimes.

[Laurels]

"Alright, I think we're good," Claire said.

She stood up and wiped the sweat from her brow, leaving small granules of sand on her forehead. The hole was deep enough for what she was hoping. He'd be protected from all types of birds, and the tide probably wouldn't wipe him away. She could get him in, then place a few rocks around the spot in order to leave the record of where he was. She didn't know what happened to the bodies, but if the authorities did manage to come and collect them, then they could surely use camera footage to find the locations.

Claire looked over at Corey's body, then at Zubin.

"Well, we're losing sunlight," she said. "Let's get him in the ground."

[decoy73]

Claire ruled the hole to be good after a good long while of digging. Zubin just held Corey's body at the wrists. He made a simple three-count before lifting up the body, moving the top half to the hole, and dropping him into the hole.

He was actually touching a dead body. Somehow, Zubin felt like this did not bode well for him.

[Emprexx Plush]

((Joachim Lovelace continued from Schwarze Rosen))

It seemed, in their search for shelter, that they had stumbled upon a burial. An interesting concept, here. Not a terribly realistic one, but interesting nonetheless.

Joachim kept the faithful knife in the palm of his hand as they approached through the grotto. He expected little trouble for anyone with enough concern for the dead to bury them at this stage, but here, exposed, with renewed purpose, it paid to be cautious. He would rather scare a jittery pall-bearer away than join the body in the grave.

"Are we interrupting?"

[Laurels]

Claire grabbed Corey's body by the feet and helped drop him into the hole. It looked so strange to see Corey down there. A week ago, she never imagined going to the funeral of one of her best friends. Now she was laying him to rest. She sighed as she stared at him. They'd have to cover the body soon. The sun was going down, and the tide was likely to start rising.

However, someone asked if they were interrupting anything. Claire turned and saw Joachim Lovelace standing nearby. She felt a chill set over her as she looked at the knife in his hand. He was a repeat murderer, and here he was, interrupting the funeral. He was probably figuring out how to kill her and Zubin right then. Claire hated to admit it, but she was really worried that she might have just dug a grave for several people.

"We're almost done here," Claire said. "We're just going to cover the grave and then go. Is that cool?"

[Ruggahissy]

((Paris Ardennes continued from Schwarze Rosen))

Paris came up from behind and stepped out a bit in front of Joachim. He hadn't expected there to be people this soon, but he took the opportunity to step out in front of Joachim as the face of their small group. He could see how people from an outside perspective might not be especially thrilled to see him, what with having been featured on the announcements more than once and rather prominently.

"Hello Claire and Zubin," he said smoothly. "Please don't be alarmed, it isn't our intention to-"

He noticed the body and what appeared to be a burial in progress. Paris looked solemnly back up at Claire. He moved forward and placed a hand on her shoulder.

"Of course, it's only right that you give your friend a befitting farewell. That's very admirable of you to take the time to do something like this for him. If there's anything we can do to help you with this, it would be no trouble at all."

[decoy73]

Zubin was starting to hear voices. Great. He was being haunted by the ghosts of the dead students. What had he done to be haunted, unless this was one of those buddy-ghost situations or something. He turned around to face the voice and oh shit it was Joachim Lovelace. Once again, Zubin was in the presence of a triple-killer, and this time he didn't even have the consolation that said killer looked good naked. So it was a good thing that Claire was able to answer whatever it was that he had said.

"Hello Claire and Zubin. Please don't be alarmed, it isn't our intention to ... Of course, it's only right that you give your friend a befitting farewell. That's very admirable of you to take the time to do something like this for him. If there's anything we can do to help you with this, it would be no trouble at all." Paris Ardennes was able to take it from there, but honestly, he sounded a little smarmy. It was as if he was practicing or something. Zubin had to think before saying something.

"Uh, mm, yeah. Uh-what do you think, Claire? He's your friend. I don't wanna to force you to anything."